Buy a used Intel NUC for $40 instead

Home Assistant is a smart home platform that runs on a PC in your home, not in the cloud. So if you don’t already have spare equipment, you’ll need to find some. But what if I told you that there was a type of computer you could buy that would save you money up front, give you superior performance, and keep your energy costs low at the same time?

It’s time to research the Intel NUC

The older the better

If you want to install Home Assistant, someone will quickly direct you to a Raspberry Pi. It’s a cheap, power-hungry board that will make Home Assistant work very well. But you can quickly overload a Raspberry Pi if you try to do too many tasks or something more demanding. You’ll also need more than the Pi itself. You’ll need to add storage and, perhaps, a case too. By the time you’ve done all of this, you’ve actually spent more than if you were just going to buy an Intel NUC.

The Intel NUC was a line of mini PCs equipped with Intel processors and, usually, Intel integrated graphics. These are small boxes designed to be VESA mounted to the back of a monitor, stored in the corner of a desk, or hidden in a TV stand. They are also very energy efficient. All this makes them perfect for a home server.

Old Intel NUCs are now very cheap

You can buy one for the price of a USB stick

I recently bought a used Linux tablet PC (a Star Labs StarLite MK V), and the seller was also trying to get me off a relatively powerful Intel NUC with 32GB of RAM for $400. In today’s market, the RAM alone justified its low asking price, but I hopped on eBay to search for this specific model to compare prices and see if I was getting a good deal. In the process, I found that NUCs older and weaker than mine cost as little as $40.

Is this a good deal? Last year I purchased a Home Assistant Green, which is the easiest and easiest way to set up Home Assistant. It comes with everything already installed so you don’t have to touch a single line of code. Simply plug the hub into the wall, connect it to Ethernet, download the Home Assistant app, and follow the instructions like any other consumer product. This Home Assistant Green cost me around $150.

Dimensions (exterior)

4.41″L x 4.41″W x 1.26″H

Weight

12 ounces

Home Assistant Green is a pre-built hub directly from the Home Assistant team. It’s a plug-and-play solution that includes everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without needing to install the software yourself.

These older Intel NUCs cost less than half while offering comparable performance. Unlike an older desktop tower, these also remain energy-efficient PCs. The TDP of the Intel Celeron chip in the eBay listing pictured above is 10W, which isn’t that far off from what you get from a Raspberry Pi 5. This means you’ll only experience a marginal increase in cost due to higher power consumption.

An old NUC may be what you want

Small hardware you can configure

At their core, Intel NUCs are desktop computers made with moving parts. Virtually all allow you to swap out the RAM and install your own storage, like many laptops. While a single-board computer has soldered RAM and relies on external storage, you can load up a NUC with 64GB of RAM and insert a fast 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD or, on some models, a cheaper 2.5-inch SATA drive. This might seem like overkill for Home Assistant, but if you’re trying to use your box as a media server or local voice-only assistant, every bit of extra storage and memory helps.

When I put together a Home Assistant Voice Preview edition last year, that’s when I really felt the limitations of my Home Assistant Green. If the NUC you buy is old and cheap enough, you will also experience these limitations. But if I increase my budget to the $150 I spent on Home Assistant Green, I could get an Intel NUC10i3FNK with an Intel Core i3-10110U processor that easily outperforms a Raspberry Pi, with 8GB of RAM and 250GB of storage, for less than $140.

You can get a more powerful NUC if you’re willing to spend a little more, but in that case you might as well get whatever mini PC you want. There are powerful options from Geekom that come with more powerful graphics cards already built in, or, as Tim Brooks recommends, you can opt for a Mac Mini. There’s nothing new about recommending a mini PC. I’m just suggesting that you should open eBay right now and buy one of the cheapest old Intel NUCs you can find. It will do just fine.

It’s time to install Home Assistant

Compared to my Home Assistant Green, there is one downside to an Intel NUC, and that is the fact that the latter is a DIY device. Fortunately, *installing Home Assistant isn’t too difficult if you’re willing to DIY*.