Guide
Always-on kWh budget for mini-PCs (2026)
Homelab boxes run 24/7. Peak Geekbench does not show up on the electricity bill — idle watts do. Convert idle draw to annual energy with a boring formula: watts × 8760 hours ÷ 1000 = kWh/year.
On Labstack Pick we publish an estimated always-on idle for each mini-PC and NAS chassis. N100-class nodes land around ~8 W → ~70 kWh/year. Dense Ryzen hosts often sit ~18–22 W → ~160–190 kWh/year before you add spinning disks. NAS figures are chassis-only; each HDD typically adds another ~5–8 W when spun up.
These are editorial estimates from CPU class and public TDP — not Kill-A-Watt lab readings. When we meter hardware ourselves, we will label measured numbers clearly and keep estimates separate.
For Home Assistant, low idle usually beats a faster CPU. Sort the mini-PC matrix by kWh/year, then open Labstack Fit on the HA job. If two N100 boxes score within a few Fit points, pick the quieter listing and verify the exact SKU wattage on the vendor page.
Hardware in this write-up
- Beelink EQ12 — Low-power Intel N100 box suited to quiet Home Assistant and light Proxmox nodes with dual 2.5GbE.
- Minisforum N100 Mini — Minisforum N100 mini-PC for quiet Home Assistant — Intel N100, check max RAM and 2.5GbE on the exact SKU, then score it in Labstack Fit against Beelink EQ12.
- GMKtec G3 N100 — Budget Intel N100 mini-PC — quiet always-on Home Assistant starting point (typical configuration).
- Beelink EQ14 — Twin-LAN Intel N305/N100 family box for quiet always-on labs that outgrow a single N100 node.
- Beelink SER5 — Compact AMD Ryzen mini-PC often used for Proxmox and Home Assistant with upgradeable SODIMM.
- Minisforum UM790 Pro — Ryzen 9 barebone mini-PC with OCulink option for GPU passthrough experiments and dense VMs.
- UGREEN DXP4800 — 4-bay NAS alternative often paired with a mini-PC compute node for media libraries and backups.
Related head-to-heads
- Beelink EQ12 vs SER5: quiet HA box or Proxmox cores?
- Beelink EQ12 vs Beelink EQ14
- GMKtec G3 N100 vs Beelink EQ12
- Minisforum N100 vs Beelink EQ12 for Home Assistant
FAQ
How do you calculate kWh/year?
Estimated idle watts × 8760 ÷ 1000. Example: 8 W × 8760 = 70,080 Wh ≈ 70.1 kWh/year.
Does this include hard drives?
Mini-PC estimates assume the chassis SSD only. NAS estimates are empty chassis — add roughly 5–8 W per spinning HDD depending on model and spin-down policy.
When will you publish measured watts?
When we buy a meter and sample units. Until then every figure is labeled as an estimate so it cannot be confused with a lab result.