It’s easy to get carried away when building out a home lab, You have easy access to refurbished or used server-grade hardware. It sounds amazing to grab a dual-CPU behemoth of a system for running a few self-hosted services, but it’s important to consider the costs outside of the hardware itself. First, there’s the cost of electricity, which will quickly become your home lab’s kryptonite with everything running 24/7. Then there are more expensive replacement parts, especially for ECC and server-specific components.