I can no longer justify spending £159 for what I thought would be a fun smart home project.

Please share with me your experience if you've done this yourself, what you would recommend.

Some things I'm concerned about:

Electricity usage, one of the key selling points was that HA Green uses so little electricity, I imagine a mini pc can't beat that?

Noise, my PC is LOUD, this will sit in our spare bedroom and when guests come round I'd rather then not hear the fan at night!

There are tons of models within the mini pc world, how do I know what CPU and RAM combination will be powerful enough to run HA.

I've seen some PC's with older versions of windows, assuming HA runs on windows, what version is required? Or do multiple versions work.

I feel like I can justify spending £100-£200 on a computer for this, but if it's sole use is HA, and I want to do very basic things (dabble in complex things later) ideally I don't really want to overspend.

I don't live in a mansion so my HA setup won't be too crazy.…