this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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homelab

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Looking at the amount of PoE splitters and how much people hate having too many power bricks, I was wondering of anybody is doing something unconventional with PoE at their homelab?

If you look at the PoE table at Wikipedia, you'll see that apart from the common 802.3af (~13W), 802.3at (25.50W), there is the beefier 802.3bt with 51W and 71.3W depending on the type. I was wondering if anybody has stories of playing with the higher power types?

The list of bookmarks

... but given how many splitters there are:

  • PoE to USB-C (data+power) - guess it'd be cool for a dumb Home Assistant tablet - everything connected with 1 cable, but it's easier to just use regular USB-C and WiFi :P Could be also used for a wifi-less weird phone server. Can also just charge your phone

  • PoE to Eth+12V - limitless possibilities. There's a guy on reddit that connected a PoE to Eth+12V splitter to power his ISP modem. The PicoPSU also takes a 12V DC plug, so you can go PoE -> PoE to 12V+Eth splitter ->PicoPsu -> some low power computer -> burn down your house

  • Did some electrical engineer finally make a PoE solution for having so many power bricks when somebody has a SFF/TinyMiniMicro cluster? Those things are big.

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[–] unsaid0415@szmer.info 4 points 11 months ago

My short unexciting story of replacing 2 power bricks with PoE:

I recently bought a D-Link DGS-1210-10P rev. B1 switch from ~2014 for $50. It has an 76W PoE power budget and supports up to PoE 802.3at (~25W).

(On the switch, OpenWrt is supported from rev. F1 - don't be stupid like me with the rev. B1)

I had some PoE-compliant devices in my homelab that I was powering with ordinary power bricks, but now that I got my switch, that had to change.

In total I was able to remove two power bricks:

  • My MikroTik RB5009 UG+S has a 802.3af PoE-in on eth1, so I removed its power brick and powered it with PoE instead
  • My UniFi AP 6 Lite supports 802.3af PoE-in, so I removed the unifi poe injector that I had and powered it directly from the switch

My homelab is rather small, so the only two remaining devices which I could swap are: