

The door monitor mostly helps when a kid walks off leaving it open thinking they closed it.
The freezer temperature monitoring has saved the contents several times. A breaker had tripped once and I didn’t notice, it let me know that I needed a generator during a power outage, and one of the kids snuck an ice cream and left the lid wide open.
So yeah, it’s been useful. It’s not needed 99% of the time.




Off lease corporate thin clients with fresh ssds. You can get something that runs off a laptop power supply, will handle more than you’re going to throw at it, and they’re insanely cheap.
I moved to one from a pi when I got serious about home assistant.
I also run a stack of networking utilities on my OPNSense router.
Jellyfin has been a bit more difficult to transition, I’m still running it on my wife’s gaming computer. I’ve pre transcoded most of our collection, but not all of it. I need to find something very cheap but also capable of handling the odd 4k transcode.