For a while, I had a Dell PowerEdge R620 running in my living room. It handled my router and gave me plenty of room to experiment. It also made itself heard whenever I tried to watch TV or had people over.
I’ve since sold it and moved to a separate MikroTik router and a smaller PC built from hardware I got from a friend. So far, that change has been great.
The interesting part of the move was deciding what was worth keeping. Over the life of the Dell, I had tried a lot of things. Relatively few had become services I wanted to keep running long term.
What the Dell was doing
Everything ran through Proxmox, which made trying things out straightforward. The server hosted pfSense as my router, game servers including Factorio, a website or two, and experiments with alternatives to Google Photos. The photo services didn’t stick around.
There was plenty of hardware available:
| Component | Dell R620 |
|---|---|
| CPU | Two Intel Xeons, each with 6 cores and 12 threads |
| Memory | 96 GB DDR3, across six 16 GB modules |
| Storage | A single SATA drive |
| Networking | Two 10 GbE ports and two 1 GbE ports |
| Graphics | An NVIDIA Quadro card |
It was a useful machine for experimenting. But as projects came and went, the drawbacks of keeping it running became harder to ignore.
Living with a rack server
The idle power draw was around 200–300 W. I estimated that I was paying roughly 200–300 SEK a month just to power the server.
The noise was getting annoying too. The R620 was a 1U server, and its fans were incredibly loud. I had a custom script running through cron every minute just to set the fan speed manually. Without it, the noise was unbearable.
The script didn’t run on startup. Sometimes after a restart, while I was still dealing with things not starting properly, it sounded like a jet taking off in my living room. Not ideal when I wanted to watch TV or have people over.
Eventually, I decided to sell it and move to a smaller setup.
Moving the router first
Before I could turn off the Dell, I needed something to take over from pfSense. I ordered a MikroTik hAP be lite, plugged it into my fibre connection, and it worked out of the box.
It is a Wi-Fi 7 router with 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radios, without a 6 GHz band. That suited the devices I already owned, and I liked the price. It’s very power-efficient and runs from a USB-C cable, which makes the setup simple.
Of course, I wanted to tinker with the setup. With the old websites and game servers going away, I didn’t need to bring over their port-forwarding rules. That left me with a fairly simple starting point to try something new: my first VLAN setup at home.
I split the network into three:
| Network | Devices and access |
|---|---|
| Main | My iPhone, MacBook, PC, and development server. Can access all three networks. |
| IoT | Smart lamps, bulbs, and Wi-Fi speakers on their own network. |
| Guest | Visitors’ devices, with access to the IoT network for lights and speakers. |
Guest access to the IoT network was deliberate. When I have people over, I want them to be able to join in with the music and control the speakers.
- pfSense router
- Game servers
- Websites & photo experiments
What I actually moved
The network was offline for about 15–20 minutes while I set up the router. Once that was done, I could unplug the Dell and sell it.
The MikroTik cost 600 SEK, and I sold the Dell for 1,500 SEK. I had paid about 1,500 SEK for the Dell and its RAM roughly two years earlier, so I recovered what I originally spent on it. Electricity was still a running cost, but the server itself had effectively cost me nothing to own over those two years.
I kept the old hard drive. If I decide I need something from it, I can still retrieve it, but I haven’t brought most of those services back. There wasn’t much vital information there, and I don’t expect to recover everything.
I did pull out one thing: my Factorio save.
That probably says more about what mattered to me than the server’s specifications do. Most of the services were experiments I had enjoyed trying, and I was happy to leave them there.
A smaller machine with a job I use
The replacement PC came from hardware a friend had available. It has an Intel Core i5-6600K with four cores and four threads, and 16 GB of DDR4 RAM.
Its main job now is remote development. I run T3 Code on it, a coding-agent platform, and it is the machine hosting the development environment I’m using to work on this site.
Moving that work off my Mac has made a noticeable difference to its battery life. The setup still feels snappy, and when I’m travelling, losing my connection doesn’t mean the agent has to stop working on the server.
For remote access, I started with Tailscale and was happy with it for a while. I also use Mullvad VPN, though, and I couldn’t get the combination working the way I wanted. I wasn’t interested in using Mullvad through Tailscale, so I switched to ZeroTier. That has worked really well for me so far.
I also use several T3 threads with separate Git worktrees at the same time. That lets me work on more than one task at once and has sped up my development workflow.
How it has worked out
So far, I’m really happy with the move. I have a separate router, fewer services to carry forward, and a development machine I actively use.
I haven’t measured the new setup’s power draw yet, so I don’t have a comparison for the router and PC together.
The most useful part of this migration was looking at each old service and deciding whether I wanted it back. I ended up keeping very little. The smaller machine gets much more use now that it runs my development environment.