Nathan Reynolds

A Zigbee pool sensor is a wireless temperature monitoring device that uses the Zigbee protocol to talk to your smart home hub. It lets you track your pool water temperature remotely, log historical data, and trigger automations through Home Assistant or SmartThings. We tested six of the most popular models on the market this season, … Read more

If you have ever lost a tomato bed because your cloud-dependent irrigation app went down during a heat wave, you already know why a local-control smart sprinkler matters. I switched my own garden to a network-only controller two summers ago and have not looked back since. Below is what our team learned after installing eight … Read more

I’ve spent the last three months running ten different indoor air quality monitors in my home, checking how each one talks to Home Assistant, how the data actually looks on a dashboard, and whether the sensors deliver honest readings. The best air quality monitor for a Home Assistant dashboard is not always the one with … Read more

Your PS5 came with 825GB of storage, and after the system eats its share, you’re left with around 667GB. That fills up fast when modern games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 eat 200GB on their own. I ran into this problem myself last year after installing three live-service titles and having to delete … Read more

After spending three months testing eight different mini PCs as dedicated OPNsense routers in our home lab, I can tell you the right hardware makes the difference between a firewall that hums along for years and one that struggles under load. The best mini PCs for OPNsense routers in balance AES-NI encryption support, multiple Intel … Read more

I spent the last two months testing eight different Zigbee ceiling fan controllers in my own bedroom to find the ones that actually work quietly at night. After installing, pairing, and sleeping next to each one, I learned a hard truth: most options on Amazon are actually smart light switches rebranded as fan controllers, and … Read more

I tested smart smoke detectors for 60 days across two homes and a rental property, and the results surprised me. After Google pulled Nest Protect from the market, finding the best smart smoke detector for a local alarm system became harder than ever. Most homeowners I spoke with said the same thing: they want phone … Read more

Building the best CPU for an Unraid media server means balancing single-thread speed, hardware transcoding, and 24/7 power draw. After testing 8 CPUs across Plex, Jellyfin, Docker, and VM workloads in , I narrowed down the picks that actually deliver smooth 4K streams without turning your media server into a space heater. Unraid is mostly … Read more

I spent the last three months running real code on ten compact machines to find the best mini pc for coding in . I built React apps, ran Docker containers with three VMs, compiled Rust crates, and loaded JetBrains IDEs with multiple indexers to see which ones actually hold up under developer workloads. I also … Read more

Setting up a home lab used to mean a full-size desktop tower humming away in a closet, but those days are over. The best mini PCs for a first home lab now deliver real virtualization performance in a box that fits in your hand, draws less power than a lightbulb, and runs silent enough for … Read more