I have a rack in my house and I hate it. My friend has a Home Theater/AV side business and my wife wanted to have a huge TV and audio setup in the basement of

I have a rack in my house and I hate it. My friend has a Home Theater/AV side business and my wife wanted to have a huge TV and audio setup in the basement of our new home. My wife gave the vague spec of “I don’t want to see that” when she saw the receiver. What she really wanted was just a cabinet under the TV. Sadly my friend is really into the Home Theater subreddit. Skipping a lot of the story, I thought I was making my wife happy by letting my friend run multiple 100ft/33m Ethernet and audio cable runs to put a giant AV rack into the basement closet. There were multiple issues with this, but after the month of debugging and removing the weird Reddit ideas, I’m mostly left with my closet being non-useful as I have a huge steel box blocking taking things in and out of it. The components themselves would fit better at their point of use rather than in this space. A friend of mine has a spare bedroom with his home lab racks in there… which means he no longer has a spare bedroom between the space taken up and the sound level of server room style hardware. OSHA friendly sound levels are not the same as “I’d like to sleep now” sound levels. The cooling hardware for real server components is meant for constant high demand in a demanding area. Not… your living room when you just want Home Assistant and to block ads. Racks make a lot of sense in real server setups. They maybe make sense in your unfinished basement. This setup might make sense in a hip startup where you want your office to look nice but you really do need some hardware for your intranet or do your dev on an in office box. For most homes? If you have a mechanical room you might just want a nice NEMA cabinet or a wall mount half rack up and out of the way. You’ll thank yourself for not living with this thing.