Hi,
I've just bought a flat (2 bed, 1 bath, 1 living/kitchen room).
I'm fairly tech-savvy and have built a few PC's in the past.
My question is, shall I get a mini-PC or just go for a green?
I don't plan to go crazy on automations, just the basics, but I want to reduce as much lag as possible.
Looking to control lights, music, see the temperature & energy usage and control the smart lock
thinking of getting the Shelly XL display to use most of it.
A Green sounds sufficient for the purpose you describe, and it will draw 1/10 of the power of a miniPC.
Lack will mostly occurs if you have lots of WIFI And Zigbee Devices, And not a proper configured Network, regardless if you have a Green or miniPC
Thanks - Do you have any tips for what products to use? I'm thinking of shelly to put behind almost everything - but are there better options out there?
One of the main things I'm trying to figure out is heating and hot water. Both are electic as theres no gas in the house
I Use Shelly ( Switches/Sensors ) for my heating/Ventilation System
With Shelly 1PM gen 2 or above You can buy an Shelly Add-On and Temperature Sensors, you can "mount" i.e with vulk-tape on your Pipes ( Not the Add-On, that goes "with a click" onto your Shelly 1PM 
Yes there are Many other Brands , i have both Tapo and Aqara ( For other Purposes )
Tapo 868mhz is great for Larger distance or behind Concrete Walls ( in i.e Basement ) , and runs without interferring 2.4ghz
Aqara is also "stable" Devices, but No Dedicated Integration
( Thou Tapo "New TP-Link" Integration keeps speewing the logs, a disaster since they merged TAPO and KASA )
Anyhow for Aqara there's a few i.e Homekit or Matter( A-Hub with i.e Zigbee devices )
Shelly's also have a few more options of Integrations, depending upon Device and Purpose
Thanks this is super helpful!
Need to wait to get in as I don't think my flat with have nutrual cables behind the switches so that might limit which route I go for.
Shelly has both,with or without Neutral, don't remember whether Aqara has, as i only use With-Neutral
EDIT: As you haven't "started yet", You might be better of looking into Matter-Devices, Instead of Zigbee
Hi
Yeah I was going down the matter route where possble! Think shelly also supports this? Or maybe HA with the adapter?
Verify available devices by location/region, but yes Matter is supported!
I've been sent a link to this - https://www.backmarket.co.uk/en-gb/p/lenovo-thinkcentre-m75q-tiny-ryzen-5-pro-3400ge-33-ssd-256-gb-8gb/62fe922d-bd01-496f-9480-87f21e61cac8?l=11
Given it seems to be a low power unit would you say its better than a green in terms of performance and running smoothly? Just trying to understand where the green lies in performance as I've seen mixed reviews, very easy and plug and play but not the best performance?
Very limited Specs in that url, however it seems to be a 65Wat Power-Supply ( Check HA-Green and it's specs your self )
Performance vice yes you get an SSD (it seems), and 8GB instead of 4, so obvious better.
But from your description, and even if you deside to use HA for more things, Green is still sufficient, 12Volt, 1A ( 12Wat at max )( your "initial" presented usecase would land at about 2-3Wat
HA don't need much to run bunch of Lights, Switches and Temp Sensors, , and showing energy usage etc. etc.
You simply don't need the performance , even if you have 2 dozen or more of each kind of device, and a bunch of automations
If you were living in a House, i.e 2-3 floors, +2-300 Connected Device, and want to use HA, to handle huge amount of i.e Calculations and excessive Monitoring, you would benefit from the ThinkCenter
But now and years ahead, im sure you will find that it will just "Idle" using 1 procent CPU ( but still draw more Power ) , Doing Nothing
I Have 3 HA running, and bought My Green last December, the 2 others are running in VM's on a Laptop, and a PC-Server
Thanks so much for this. Very handy to understand the greens use case! Green it is!