Building out the home lab has been a lot of fun. Going from a single prebuilt network-attached storage (NAS) device to used enterprise gear and a server cabinet, I learned a lot about how best to configure a smart home and what I actually needed in the home office. Turns out, less can be more, which is why I replaced those enterprise beasts with a single AMD Threadripper server.
This thing absolutely flew with 64 cores, but the 150W idle power draw was simply ridiculous. That's when I looked at mini PCs, but instead of settling for these small devices, I ended up with a few compact PCs.