Pavel is an electrician by trade and a home-lab builder by habit. Raspberry Pis, mini PCs, VLANs, UPS units and tidy cabling are his beat, always on a budget.
Measure the load, check it against both the watt and VA ratings, read runtime off the maker's chart, and know when pure sine matters. A worked example included.
A UGREEN NAS gives a home lab more CPU, RAM and M.2 slots. A Synology NAS gives it DSM, SNMP and mature backups. How to choose, and how to watch either one.
VLANs, mirroring, LACP and SNMP: what a managed switch adds to a home lab, why many budget models cannot be polled, and how to pick ports, PoE and cooling.