Just stumbled upon your article while looking to get a rack and start building things out. Great write up btw!
I’m looking at getting a wall mounted style networking rack to save on space. Full depth server racks are just to do for my liking and I don’t intend to house any rack mounted servers in there anyway.
I’m having some trouble sorting out a UPS. I want to get a rack mounted one if possible because aesthetics… (I’m sure you understand!). I had a look at the UPS you use and noticed it uses a simulated sine wave. From what I’ve read most people in the home lab community recommend using pure sine wave but I simply cannot find one in my region has a short enough depth to fit in the rack. My rack will contain very similar gear to you with the addition of some NUCs and a NAS.
Have you had any problems with the UPS when it fails over to battery? Apparently simulated sine can cause some devices to reboot when the power switches to battery. Keen to hear your experiences.
No, I have not had any issues with this rack-mounted UPS. That said, I later added a regular floor UPS. The price of the rack-mounted is about 2x that of the standard UPS.
So will probably not replace the rack-mounted unit if it ever dies.
Great to hear that you haven’t had any problems with the UPS. Have you ever had a power cut which caused everything to run off UPS and did everything in the rack just continue to run without issue?
Yeah at least 20 times in the last 2 years unfortunately. As well as low voltage and surges. It has worked very well! Runs as long as advertised and the beeps can be muted.
Awesome article Hayden! Its exactly what I was looking for. What an amazing array of places you have lived, Im currently residing in Vancouver and have lived all over as well.
Could you give a estimate of the total cost for you as your setup is now?
In your opinion, if I was going to go with the first option and upgrade the router but keeping in mind I will be building a home lab in the next 6 months what would be the best option?
Thanks for the feedback. Honored to be able to interact like this with readers. Welcome to the forums!
Vancouver, around spring and fall, is such an amazing array of beauty.
Due to import duties, my cost will be a bit inflated, almost double. Without the added air/sea freight and duty everything in the rack up to “Update 4 – May 1st, 2020” probably came up to around $1500 USD.
*Including the non-rack items such as 250 ft cat 6 cables and Unifi Access points and other stuff.
A lot of the cost was accessories like cables, rack shelves, fans, non-rust rack screws, cable wall clips, blank 1u’s etc. Without those would be < $1000.
I’ve updated the article today. Some of the devices have been discontinued or are not easily available. Updated with my replacements or other recommended hardware and accessories. It’s going on 4 years since the original build.
Still working on the homelab - endded up starting with a mostly virtualized set of hosts running on ProxMox VE. I sacrificed my “old” System76 desktop (minus the Radeon GPU card) for the VM hosting.
Here logged into a KDE Neon jumpbox, and RDP from there to a Windows 10 Desktop:
Following along with The Homelab Almanac (from Matt Taggart).
All behind an OPNsense hardware firewall that will also be the real FW for the whole home LAN in the not too distant future :-).
I did… thats what lead me to your contact page haha. Even though its about 6 months old (the blog post) is it still relevant? Anything needing updating or?
Or are font just set tiny? 
Me old eyes need the fine detail.