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
- PoE nuc https://www.gorite.com/poe-power-over-ethernet-lid-for-intel-nuc-gr-lid-poe
- All-in-one PoE computers
- 1U PoE server
… but given how many splitters there are:
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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
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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
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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.
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 homelab is rather small, so the only two remaining devices which I could swap are: