Hi all
Thinking to jump into the world of home automation and thinking between buying an old desktop, which I can get sub $100 or Raspberry pi4. Did some research and seems like raspberry pi consumes a lot less power as compared to old desktop (i5 4770 with 16 gig ram)
What's everyone else is using to power the home assistant. I do have a Lenovo N200 old laptop (2008 model) with 2 gigs of ram but that doesn't support virtualisation and hence cannot support home assistant for windows
Thanks
Thanks 👍. Got 2x Xiaomi hubs and couple of motion/contact sensors.
Yea I think generally you going to run it 24/7 (electricity adds up)and plus RP4 is pretty small aswell. Goodluck finding one in stock though unless you wanna pay double.
I ran HA on a Pi for many years and it was great. I moved to a desktop running Proxmox recently but purely to consolidate everything to one device. HA now runs happily in a VM and I have two other Proxmox containers for running Docker stuff. Pi = easy, PC with Proxmox = learning curve but that's about it other than a bit of power consumption.
What sort of specs on that desktop? Looking at running a Proxmox stack myself.
It's a Dell Optiplex 9010 SFF with an i5 and 8Gb RAM. I would have liked the USFF version which is lower power and I should put more RAM in it but it works fine - way faster than my previous Pi V4, and it's loaded up with Frigate (plus a Coral), Docker running about 10 containers plus HA in a full VM. Energy usage for my WHOLE comms cabinet is about 150W including 24 port POW switch, QNAP NAS, modem, the Dell 9010 and a couple of other power plugs.
150W
oof… 150W = 3.6kWh/day = 1,314kWh/year = $300/year
(assuming constant 150W draw and ~$0.22 per kWh)
How much is Linode charging these days…?
@Chandler: Ah well, it's a sunk cost for me. High WAF and we have solar so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Our fridges run at just under that too. Really interesting to watch all the circuits with the IoTaWatt plugged in to HA.
@Rebem: Naturally - I'm looking at it as someone who doesn't have any hardware (yet), and that hardware is (ideally) going to cost me less than that annual electricity bill. Don't see it working on a VPS but anyway - especially with any connectivity issues causing problems (and thus less WAF).
how much did you get your coral for?
If you plan to do more, its easy to run it in a VM
Unraid for NAS, Dockers, media server etc
Then you're better off with a pc build
Sorry what's unraid /NAS etc?
If you plan to do more than just run home assistant
NAS for network attached storage
Unraid is an OS
Have a look at Home Assistant Yellow
Thanks that isn't available is Australia yet, is it ?
Not available anywhere yet. I think some early purchasers have started/are about to start getting theirs.
I put my HA on an old celeron laptop, your N200 laptop sounds perfect for HA. I used to have it on a old desktop box, but the fan noise annoyed me and also probably the power consumption. I also had HA on a Raspberry PI, there was a noticeable lag in the interface and the SD card was prone to dying after a while.
I think you can put Home Assistant OS directly onto the laptop hard drive without doing any virtualization. That would be my choice if I were you.
Raspberry pi 4 will be fine
Get a conbee or sonoff zigbee stick to open up your options for sensors and devices