Try a used laptop. Cheap, power efficient, built in UPS, small. Can be quite powerful and some are even upgradable

As a point of reference regarding power consumption:

I've been running a desktop non-stop for the last ten years (built as a gaming rig) as a file/media server, so it's probably the worst thing you can run this way, power-wise. Has an 800 watt power supply, running windows.

I've done the math many times, costs me about $1/day in power at mostly idle.

Just presenting a worst-case example as a guideline.

I've recently spun up a Raspberry Pi Zero W for PiHole, DHCP, DNS, Tailscale, Joplin and Bitwarden. It's maximum power draw is TWO WATTS. Haha

Currently running a watt meter on the desktop, should have some decent actual numbers from it soon, but can't imagine idle is any less than 50 watts.

So there's two extremes. Don't be me (looks like you aren't!)

Edit: I wouldn't recommend the Zero W for this, it's underpowered. I'm already overloading it with just PiHole and Tailscale, honestly.

Look into a NUC on ebay. I was able to snag a new 11th Gen i3 for 200 eur. Power draw is about 7w with a headless Debian. Running a media server, nextcloud, pihole, an arr stack and I'm planning to add home assistant and a zigbee bridge which I now run on a pi.

If you aren't planning to run to much on it a rpi4or5 will actually be enough and these things can draw 15 on absolute max load.

I have an Intel NUC I got on eBay for £50. It’s running 30 containers, 10W draw

Lenovo m900 tiny. Low cost and power.

A raspberry pi or orange pi could definitely run all of those things at very low power consumption.

@pathief I think what you are looking for is intel n100 since it only uses like 6-watt TDP, but before jumping to that, you should look at Heaven video. If you only want to run for a year or two, maybe the older CPU is much better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PisIPpbMkTc

I hope you found what you are looking for.

Any Intel NUC(the small 4x4 ones) 8th gen or forward will fit the bill.

Have a look at the ServeTheHome site and channel on youtube ... he's done a load of good reviews of AliExpress devices and some tiny/mini/micro devices (think thinclients)

He covers power consumption and some interesting points (like which recent multi-Gb NICs are supported by pfSense / Proxmox / etc)

Just watching those should at least help you decide what you need.

I was going to build my own virt server and I ended up with a low power, silent, passively cooled box to run all my VMs in... for much cheap.

Hey fellow european!

Tinytronics.nl -> Pi4 model B 8GB: 87€ and in stock. The 4GB model is 68€. They also have orange Pi for a higher budget.

Kiwi-electronics.com -> Pi 4 model B, 4GB? 63€. They also have all the pi accessories you could want.

If you are going to use paperless for important documents, and if you want to not lose data for sure, get a 1TB cheap HDD or something and a USB3.0 adapter. SD cards will eventually fail.

Otherwise, get an old used laptop 2nd hand. I used an old HP probook G1 laptop for about a year for my server. It didn't use much power at all.

Not to state the obvious one, but there's always the Raspberry Pi.

The supply has gotten better on those, so you can probably pick one up in your price range, and the power draw is super minimal.

HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini (or equivalent)? You can get them for pretty cheap on eBay.

A cheap android box + armbianOs is also an option if you're looking for low power. I have a 7watt one that's running 24/7 for the last few years.

A refurbished elite desk sff PC works great.

At around 80 euros then for lowest power you should go Raspberry Pi, for most performance while still being low power an old business laptop is fine, and since you don't need the screen you can buy one with a broken screen.

A used Android pixel phone. You can root it and install Pideploy and run PiHole through it.

I have an old Pixel 3a doing exactly this. The other services I don’t quite know if they have an Android implementation.

Doesn’t suit your every use case, but I figured I’d share.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI/

It's in German but you get the idea

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.

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