Homelab

Not even an ADSL modem caught fire and that was hit by lightning so good that it partially melted. The power adapter was varm afterwards but not critically so

I have everything on UPS's, my Synology NAS contacts me if there's an issue, etc. My fear of fire stemmed from being out of town when a co-worker texted to tell me my apartment building was on fire. Luckily, my unit was fine, but not so the people in back. The fire was started by idiots smoking on the rooftop deck. After that I installed cameras so I could see what was going on. But I don't worry about my equipment per se. As others have suggested, there's all sorts of things that can start a fire, large appliances, hot water heater, wiring in the walls, flames from the house next door, burglars, arsonists, plane crashes, ghosts, zombies, etc. You will never be safe! Bwhahahahahaha! Happy Halloween!

I don't worry about fires and stuff because I have a lot more insurance than I do stuff.

I see your comments are being downvoted but I have a different perspective on this.

First I get why the downvotes are there. You can’t really go into an aviation community as a fighter pilot and be like, I’m afraid whatever random commercial airplane I’m on is just going to crash. I mean you could- I’ve seen it here on Reddit - but, many in the community are going to look at it a bit strangely. Perhaps understandably so from their perspective.

Here’s the thing, though. They’re not you, and you’re not necessarily wrong to feel the way you do.

First you’ve got to acknowledge the reality of the situation and understand the actual risk. Once you can separate the facts from the irrational fear, you’re not wrong on this.

Now, on the irrational fear part, I’d say: address it!

This subreddit has no requirement to justify your setup. If there were, almost no one would be posting here. Beyond that though, the whole point of this sub is to explore, build and share own lab. That lab can be whatever. There’s people here with 100GbE. There’s people here with dozens of cores. There’s people here running large tape backups. And they’re all doing all kinds of things from Plex to ai to whatever. I could go on. Again, no one has to defend it.

So if you look at your lab and say to yourself- I really don’t like the idea of a fire, and maybe it wouldn’t happen, but wouldn’t it be cool if I had something where I never had to worry about the smallest chance of it happening? Then this sub is the perfect place to explore addressing it: spec and buy the right hardware. Design and integrate monitoring and protection systems into it. Tie it all into home assistant or whatever. Then come back and share what you came up with.

As long as you can have a handle on the reality of the situation, you’re good. After all, there’s people here with HA setups for their lab - that they do no production..or dev.. on. There’s people that run ECC for fun. There’s people that have more than one or two (dozen) TBs more than they can publicly defend…

Again, if you feel the concern, do something about it and share what you’ve done. Just don’t let it own you.

I don’t think it’s so irrational. Maybe a bit paranoid, but I had a client whose house burned down because they had one of the APC recalled power strips/surge protector. Someone even died in the house fire, not to mention the loss of the house and its contents. Displacing the family for a couple years, etc.

There’s only so far you can go tho. Take proper measures that satisfy your concerns and be on with your life. Hell, your house could be struck by lighting. Or freak accident where a home heating oil truck plows into your house and explodes. Or maybe a mouse chews through some electrical wire in you walls. Can’t prevent everything, but at least get a handle on things you can. Connected smoke detector, fire extinguisher, and an easy path from entrance to the computer/server for first responders if the worse happens. Idk imho there are plenty of other things to worry about.

UL rated, I don't worry. There are a thousand other things which could and do cause fire. Hope you never have kids they're a vastly more likely source of home fires as well. Your odds of being stuck by lightening are greater. And if you strip away the kitchen as the majority of home fires your odds of being stuck by lightening in a single year isn't that far off. Yes this is a completely irrational fear.

Lol I kill most devices and water when I vaca. All my pis and nas and such are offline now and will turn back on when home!

I thought about a similar problem when I bought a 4080 for my gaming rig. I was positive I got the power connector pushed all the way in. And I do leave my pc on when I'm not at home. I only shut down if I know I won't be able to use it for a day or two. But your fears are legitimate.

I share the same (or similar) fear, but for slightly different reasons. Let me explain. My homelab started as a case missing project. I had some leftover components and an old computer case. In order to make it work/fit, I had to butcher an old PSU. Everything worked and I started upgrading. Now it's running my UnRaid server. If I planned to have it running 24/7 I would definitely use some better PSU. And until I actually upgrade it (to something which is, at least, not opened with manually spliced wires) I don't completely trust it.

I totally feel you on this. In my case I got into homelab after also getting into 3d printing, a hobby that really could be a fire hazard if something went awry, and my brain has wrongly filed my new hobby under “all hobby things that run continuously are a fire hazard”, even though in reality the risk here is basically zero. It probably doesn’t help that when I got my first 1u server I only plugged in one of the redundant power supplies and the other popped and let out the magic smoke.

If you feel that your equipment is that questionable that it could catch fire at any moment, it’s time to replace your hardware.

Grab a can of compressed air and blow everything out once a year to reduce the risk of combustion. If you’re worried about things shorting out: do you have some questionable sata power splitters that need to be replaced? Anything like that you’ll replace all of them for $50, so just do it for peace of mind.

Don’t use the cheapest worst power supplies, use something that’s been reviewed and known to have working over-current protection which will cut the power should something go wrong.

And, as a last resort, find some kind of smart smoke sectors (or way to monitor audio/broadcast from smoke detectors) and a trust worthy smart power plug (with power monitoring) that you can connect all your gear to, so you can set up some automation to tell you if the alarm goes off, and either turn off the power automatically or have a way to remotely turn off the smart plug.

The smoke alarms we have, are 4 that communicate wirelessly between them, so they all go off together. Let Home Assistant monitor for that freq and you know if any smoke alarms go off.

Get yourself a couple of these. Put them near utilities and equipment. Only activated by fire.

https://www.passivefirewarehouse.com.au/the-fire-ball-by-ELIDE-FIRE

Back when my homelab was a simple Pentium 1, I somehow had a PC Speaker melt down while I was out of the house.

Since then, it's been a constant worry that something will catch fire while I'm not at home.

One of the reasons why I run monitoring, so I can check on the status of things.

The only stuff I have ever had catch fire in over 20 years if doing this were old crt's and tv's. So I just never used to leave those on when leaving the house. I have yet to experience an lcd failure. I have had power supply failures including Apple laptops but they just let the magic smoke out.

For the most part, I would never be too worried about a device catching fire. The biggest thing is it's usually going to be a single component failing thermally either due to a short circuit, overload or bad design. But most devices found in a circuit when they fail. This way don't usually get hot enough to start fires in surrounding areas as mostly the components next to the failed part are not going to be flammable at those temperatures. Usually the most common fires you see in PCs is that SATA connectors. And then given that most computers are still cases in glass, even though the connector may start on fire, it usually won't spread too far due to not much else being flammable next to it. At least you're given a bit of time. If it does fully catch fire, usually you're giving a bit of time to either put it out or get it out of the area.

Also, if a component fails due to overheating a lot of times that will just kill the device or the power and stop the thermal run away so it never actually gets hot enough to catch fire.

I've had a lot of devices that have killed themselves and mostly they'll release the magic smoke but that will be it. They won't continue the power. They won't continue the burn. They'll just die and make a big stink.

The only exceptions I would probably say are battery operated devices as those are known to be a little more flammable due to the lithium ion batteries.

When it comes to electrical fires, I believe most of the fires are usually caused by bad wiring in the walls using undersized wires and overloading them with things like space heaters. And given how I seen some places do their wiring. Yeah they can be fire hazards.

So far I've been running my server and server rack for about 10 years in my home using the same normal PC power supply on my storage device and it's been running 24/7 without issue. And if you think about it, they sometimes do say that leaving advice on is less prone to failure than turning it on and off as you're not cycling the power as much causing temperature the heat up and cool down.

Ps. I am on mobile and using voice to text so please ignore any weird formatting

I'm sure everything I am currently running is safe, but I have that fear also, ever since one of the PSUs in one of my R320's died and smoke started poring out the back (blown cap I think) - hasn't happened since, but it's one of the things I worry about

Well.. while it is very unlikely for that to happen, if you want peace of mind, just install a smoke detector near your lab or anything that you suspect it can catch fire. That way you can get notified and call the firefighters Ina pinch

Whilst I am with the "yeah, that's irrational" crowd, there are these things that might help allay some fears. https://www.controlfiresystems.com/products/fire-suppression/ceasefire-pre-engineered/

About 6.5 years ago, we had a cheap power splitter, turning one molex into 2 sata power cables, short out and catch fire inside the server, in a rack, in the DC. It melted the drive it was attached to, but the server didn't even power down. Just looked like a drive failure until the tech got out there to swap the drive. Swapped the connector with a better one, and the drive, and put it back in prod. It's still in prod today, though I'm decomming it.

Things might catch fire, but there has to be flammable material close enough for the fire to spread to burn down the house. I'm building my own soundproofed real with fire resistant sound proofing materials. Maybe I'll post something about it when it's done.

Well its homelab, setup homeasistant or openhab and add some air sensors and temp sensors near "problematic" devices and parts and make it send mesages to phone if anything goes out of normal values. Even shut everything down automaticaly. The beauty of home automation 😀

Install some smart fire/smoke detectors so they can notify you if something happens (it likely won't)