Blog on Suraj's Homelab

How I Manage Power Interruptions in My Homelab

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Power cuts are a fact of life

If you run a homelab in India, power interruptions aren’t a question of if — they’re a question of when. Gurgaon gets frequent short outages (a few seconds to a few minutes to a few hours), plus occasional longer cuts during storms or maintenance windows.

My goal was simple: keep the homelab and network running through every outage, no matter how brief. Servers should never see a power blip. The gaming PC gets its own dedicated protection because it draws too much for the main inverter.

Homelab Network Architecture — VLANs, OpenWrt, and a Managed Switch

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The problem

When the homelab was just a Raspberry Pi, everything sat on the same flat network — my gaming PC, phones, TV, and all the homelab services. That’s fine until you start running things like Frigate NVR, Pi-hole DNS, and a dozen Docker containers. One misconfigured service and suddenly your gaming session is lagging because Jellyfin is saturating the network with a transcode.

The fix: VLANs. Separate the homelab into its own isolated network segment, with controlled routing between them.

Homelab Power Consumption — What Does It Actually Cost to Run?

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The question everyone asks

“Doesn’t running all that 24/7 cost a fortune in electricity?”

Short answer: no. The whole homelab costs roughly the same as running a ceiling fan. Here’s the actual breakdown.

Measuring power draw

I measured each device at the wall using a kill-a-watt style power meter. Here are the idle and typical load numbers:

Device	Idle	Typical load	Max draw	Notes
Raspberry Pi 4B (2GB)	~5W	~7W	~9W	Includes SATA SSD via USB + cooling fan
Old Laptop (8GB)	~9W	~12W	~18W	Very efficient — barely sips power
Lenovo ThinkCentre (64GB)	~20W	~35W	~65W	Biggest consumer, does the heavy lifting
TP-Link TL-SG108E Switch	~4W	~4W	~5W	Constant draw, no variation
OpenWrt Router	~5W	~5W	~7W	Routing + firewall + DHCP
WD Blue 4TB HDD	~5W	~8W	~10W	Drops to <1W when spun down
Total	~48W	~71W	~114W

Most of the time the homelab sits around 48–71W — the ThinkCentre is the biggest consumer, but its modern CPU is surprisingly efficient at idle. The old laptop is remarkably frugal at just 9–12W.

Setting Up Frigate NVR with RTSP Cameras

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What is Frigate?

Frigate is an open-source NVR built around real-time object detection. It runs locally — no cloud, no subscription, no monthly fees. Point it at any RTSP camera feed and it’ll detect objects (person, car, dog, cat) in real-time, record clips on motion events, and let you review everything through a clean web UI.

Why Frigate over something like MotionEye?

MotionEye is fine for basic motion detection, but it triggers on everything — a curtain moving, shadows shifting, rain. Frigate gives you actual object labels, which means far fewer false alerts. You get a notification that says “person detected at the front door” instead of 300 motion clips of nothing.

Setting Up Joplin Server on Raspberry Pi

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Why self-host Joplin?

Joplin Cloud costs money, and I don’t love my notes sitting on someone else’s server. The Pi was already running 24/7 anyway, so spinning up a sync server was a natural fit. Total cost: ₹0/month.

The alternatives I considered:

Option	Why I skipped it
Joplin Cloud	Paid, data on third-party servers
Nextcloud sync	Too heavy for a 2GB Pi just for notes
Dropbox/OneDrive	Works but sync conflicts are painful
Self-hosted Joplin Server	✅ Free, fast, full control

Stack

Joplin Server — the official sync backend (Docker)
PostgreSQL 15 — note storage and metadata (Docker)
nginx — reverse proxy with SSL termination
Bash script — automated daily pg_dump backups
Tailscale — remote access from anywhere

Prerequisites

Raspberry Pi 4B running headless Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit)
Docker and Docker Compose installed
A domain or local hostname for nginx (e.g., joplin.home.lan)

Step 1 — Docker Compose setup

Create a working directory: