It’s fun to make videos about tiny mini PCs and overkill NAS builds, but this one is about the least exciting (and most important) piece of a home lab: a UPS. I break down what a UPS actually does, why I think it’s basically essential if you run any kind of server, and how it saves you from the really nasty stuff—corrupted file systems, data loss, and even potential hardware issues—when the power drops or browns out. I also go through how to pick the right unit without getting lost in spec-sheet nonsense: focus on real wattage, don’t run it at 100%, and make sure you’ve got enough runtime to shut down cleanly. Then I show how I set up Network UPS Tools (NUT) so one “primary” machine (in my case a Raspberry Pi) talks to the UPS over USB and shares that status to the rest of the lab as NUT clients—TrueNAS and Proxmox in my demo. The missing piece is what happens after power comes back, so I built a small tool called WOLNUT: a Docker container that watches NUT and then sends Wake-on-LAN magic packets to bring the right systems back online (without waking machines that were intentionally off). It’s not perfect, but it’s been working well for me—and it’s a great use for that old Raspberry Pi you don’t know what to do with.