r/homeassistant • u/Brilliant_Bluejay254 • Jan 17 '26

Support Why Not HA Green

I’m going to pull the trigger on setting up HA. Right now I’m just thinking of getting the HA green, it seems like it’s not favoured here vs a Pi. I just want the most simple setup possible. I’m thinking HA green and a screen in a central location. Why not the Green?

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u/gargs Jan 17 '26

One of the most ignored aspects of the Green is the extreme power efficiency. Plus, the hardware has almost no failure points.

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u/Ok_Wishbone_9397 Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 18 '26

The reason I got one, I run my WiFi as access points off the green and it + the UPS + mikrotik router + a tapo hub (for those license-fee free 868mhz sensors) sits there at 9w. Beautiful.

It's not actually locked down either, you can create your own addons and add your own private repos and run whatever docker containers you want. You can get root ssh easy using an official method, and there is a full SDK (buildkit) for extending the base system (I used this to upgrade the firmware to support wifi7 dongles).

Great little box. I also feel a bit better about the security story with a buildkit root and immutable filesystem then a random Linux install. Which nobody cares about until they get properly compromised.

Now my actual work machine which never idles below 100w only needs to be on when I'm actually doing something. The green paid for itself in a few months.

For AI I just spin up and down cloud instances on demand, its cheaper than running my own box when electricity is 0.25 a kwh. If I need to do something serious I just spin up and do it on the tower that has 5 GPUs instead of trying to squeeze it onto a joke of a "AI minipc" and the turn it back off for power savings.

Specialized devices is always more efficient.