Noob setting up a HomeLab in a culvert, underground, off grid in Alaska

Communities DIY Corner
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Super cool, beautiful place. I had no idea metal tracks would work better, everything I’ve seen has suggested rubber is better for the snow although I’ve never tried steel tracks.

Ten coord of wood a season, ouch! My back hurts just reading that. Have you looked into a ground source heat pump? I’m looking forward to cutting tons more firewood from our standing dead as well, but only after we use as much of it as we need to on the lumber mill to finish some build projects. Then after that, I want to build a bunch of wood sheds around the cabin so we can see huge stacks of wood covered from the elements, and then never burn it. But it’s a nice insurance policy to have though. I just like the aesthetic of a nice row of split firewood stacked up.

I always think the same thing about exhaust heat. Our little diesel heaters put out far more heat wasted into the air as exhaust than they put out hot air into a building. But I guess it needs to be hot to exhaust properly and if you take too much of it and cool it down then it doesn’t work as well? I’m not sure, but I’m with you that there must be a way to use it.

Good luck with the YT channel, I think it’s cool to share the beauty with others if nothing else.

Fire season around here so far isn’t bad. We had one year where we couldn’t see the mountains the whole summer because of smoke from up north. That was the summer a buddy flew in to visit and spent a couple weeks with us after I told him how beautiful it was. He left having never seen the glaciers or mountains. Lightning is rare up here fortunately, and we tend to typically get a lot of rain in the summer. In our little area we have thousand foot drop offs on all sides, two that are gradual and two that are almost straight down and two of those sides have rivers or creeks and marsh so I think we’re in pretty good position to defend against fires so long as we don’t start one. We’re going to be digging some ponds around the property and plumbing for fire response as well as having our sensors looking for fire. Our structures are mostly all covered in metal. Fire is definitely a concern and one of the reasons I’m glad we don’t use the wood stove anymore except as a backup.

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I’m looking at a TEG system for the boiler, really just started digging into it, as I wanted to use the dishcarge heat from the boiler to add an extra ~10deg to the heat pump (we really can’t dig anything underground here, bedrock everywhere). I figure a TEG should be able to power a couple of fans, so I’m sort of down to just designing the heat trap (I don’ want any of the exhaust, just the heat). We don’t burn anything except clean wood in the boiler, so the ash (and sawdust) I just truck around and mix into soil where the trees struggle. The old guard “neighbor” runs in sync with the land, doesn’t take too much, doesn’t leave anything toxic, so I’m trying to follow his lead, but he doesn’t have the tech savvy side, so he benefits from my skills, I benefit from his rancher know-how. We installed an old second hand sawmill on his property this fall, just to see if it was feasible. It was so we’re going to upgrade to a “good” mill saw next year. Do you like the one you have? Hopefully I’m not crapping all over your thread here, it was a monster already. :slight_smile:

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Do you happen to have a pond nearby? A deep enough, big enough pond can also work for a ground source heat pump if you’ve got one. I hope to eventually dig a vertical well and replace our ASHP with a ground source one. Should be half as much electricity draw in the winter I think.

It’s not my thread, I’m just gifted the chance to post on this forum like you are, so as far as I’m concerned you can post whatever you want here. Plus I’m digging your contributions.

I am not even remotely a good or experienced sawyer, I just finally got it working this past summer but so far we’re liking our mill. Planning on swapping out the gas engine with an electric one so we can run the mill off solar. Not sure when we’ll do that though. I’m hoping we get a wood shop built next summer and can start taking our time making good stuff out of the wood. I have a lot to learn but I’m pretty excited about learning how to woodwork.

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The only ponds are down in the valley, we really are on the side of a mountain, our well is 500 feet up near the main house, and a second one at the bottom of the property that’s 300 feet…both get maybe 3g/m so not a ton.
Woodworking is incredibly rewarding. I used to do a lot of hardwood, but hardwood is tough, you need perfect lines, perfect cuts…softwood is easy, you can cheat. Just make sure things are “level”, and then you can go “rustic” finish, and hide a lot of things with sanding/trim. Softwood expands and contracts a fair bit, and holds a lot of moisture. A kiln is a good idea if you want to do furniture (and worry about insects). Since I’ve switched to softwood, I’ve also switched to mostly oxidized finish, since it looks more natural (and it doesn’t stink). Dissolve steel wool into regular vinegar (or malt if you want more color), and apply, it oxidizes the wood, giving a lot of nice variation. Maybe we can trade solar panel knowledge for woodworking know how :slight_smile:

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Sounds like a good trade, woodworking for solar. Although DIYSolarForum dot com from Will Prowse is the gold standard. That’s where we learned. You can post about your plan or your goal and people will educate you. We did about two years of research on there before we ordered anything and we owe everything we’ve done to that board’s free education.

We have spruce (soft) and alder (hard) wood to work with. I’m not sure if anybody mills alder though, that would be weird. So it’s pretty much spruce for us. I wish we had cedar around here, that would be awesome.

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Spam calls seem to be a much larger issue in the US. It does happen here of course too, but I get maybe one call a month. My mother who has signed up her number in all sorts of places over the years got maybe ten total over the last three years. This somehow seems to be a much much bigger issue in the US because.

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Starting to look at our AI workstation options now.

We’re considering the System 76 Thelio Mega, with a single NVIDIA 96GB RTX Pro 6000 so that we’d be able to load larger models with it. We’d be primarily loading Sam 3D and models like that to produce CAD files, and to do object detection on live streams, and from time to time we’d use it to train our own detection models.

Thinking:

Threadripper Pro 9955X (16 cores - 32 threads)
RTX Pro 6000 (not sure if it’s desktop or server)
128GB ECC DDR5 RAM (5600 MHZ)
1TB M.2 SSD for OS (additional 24TB for non-OS)

I’m assuming I could upgrade the CPU and RAM later if needed.

Of course we also want to use this thing to train our own models. Apparently a 5090 is better, but less VRAM and I’m not sure about splitting a model up between two GPUs and that additional complexity. From the little research I’ve done, it seems one larger VRAM card would be better than multiple GPUs.

We’d want this machine to be upgradable so that we could tinker with it over time and repair it.

I need to do a lot more research (starting with Hive’s thread), my head is swimming with all the options and this is a lot of money… And I need to figure out all the bottleneck issues that might be there that would degrade performance (PCI lanes and such).

And now I’m trying to figure out if I need MIG or not thanks to Hive’s thread. I had thought I could have multiple linux programs accessing the GPU at the same time without making vGPUs, but it might be nice to be able to split it up into separate dedicated GPUs for various tasks. The tasks that would run all the time would be a) object detection on multiple video live streams, b) a second process would be creating narration text based on objects in the videos, and c) a third process would be turning that test into audio narration and then it would also splice videos together with the audio narration (which I imagine would use CPU).

Apparently the kind of MIG that is supported depends on if the 6000 is a desktop or a server version. I need to look into that more.

Then from time to time we’d run a separate process like Sam 3D or some other LLM with RAG. And from time to time we’d train a model or two. But these wouldn’t be ongoing processes. We’d also use this machine for CAD design but that should also leverage the CPU I would think.

Would want this workstation connected via KVM switch(s) over fiber/ethernet to about four locations on the property so that we could use the machine even when not in the culvert. Apparently using MIG would disable the graphics out function of the card, so not sure KVM would work unless I got a second graphics card to act in the traditional role. Apparently a second non-NVIDIA graphics card would be best to avoid conflicts.

I figure this machine is a good skeleton to try to understand what will work best for my use case, and once I learn more I’ll probably see if I can source the machine myself and build it to save some money although I like System76 and with the machine being this expensive I don’t want to learn anything the hard way and mess something up. The fact the RTX 6000 Pro is listed as “non-refundable” on the System76 website gives me pause, need to figure out what that means).

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It has always been much cheaper to place calls in the US than elsewhere. With landlines, the US was flat-rate / no charge for unlimited local calls. Even after the switch to cellphones with high per-minute rates, the receiving party had to pay their carrier’s rates even for incoming calls. The US never had free incoming cellular calls, where the caller (e.g. on a landline) pays a per-minute tariff to the receiving party’s phone provider.

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20K seem steep for this setup? I may need to readjust my old person understanding of money (“I’ll give you five dollars to mow my whole lawn!”)

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Its an very unfortunate time to buy that DDR5 memory.

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You think 128GB of memory and the 16 core CPU would be good enough for running that RTX 6000?

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Think I’ll just go with 4TB SSD and bring the price down to about 16K. I’d rather wait on the purchase, but with all the turmoil in the markets…might need to get it while it’s available which seems to be the tagline for the past year or so.

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I think if you’ll do the inferncing on the GPU you’ll be fine with 16 cores and 128GB. I would not advise to do inferencing on the main memory and CPU if you do not really need to, because it is slow.

With a RTX Pro 6000 you can nicely fit a GLM-4.5-Air or Qwen3-30B Model completely in VRAM.

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Thank you sir. I think I need to get a separate graphics card to actually provide graphics so I can do the virtual GPU stuff. I saw some folks talking about other NVIDIA cards conflicting with the 6000 Pro though.

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If you need video output go with an Intel Arc A380 or something like that. The drivers for that come with the kernel, AMD would work as well.

If you wanna do virtual GPU stuff with Nvidia MIG do your research. I have the workstation card and did not get it to work for me. The server edition is supposed to have better support though.

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You’re the best, good to know.

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No worries mate, if you have any specific questions I can help you with or you want me to try any software you wanna use, let me know and I will see what I can do. I have the RTX Pro 6000 Workstation Edition.

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System76 told me the CPU can’t be swapped later. Was thinking about ordering the Threadripper Pro9955WX (16 cores) but was hoping I could upgrade it in the future, but I guess I’m stuck once I buy it. Or maybe I’d just have to replace the whole motherboard but I bet that’s expensive.

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I asked System76 about the GPU issue. From what I understand if I use the Pro 6000 and MIG, then I need another graphics card to supply actual graphics to the monitor. I asked them about this and the said:

If you want a second GPU, then we would recommend going with the “2x 96 GB NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q” option. Each GPU in this option is 300W. If you go with the singular 6000 Pro, it is the full version at 600 W and you would not be able to add a second GPU.

I assume he’s saying can’t be a second GPU because he means without going over the power brick power output. So I’d just get a better power brick. I’m confirming with him. Also, hoping to avoid some of the things I’ve read about two NVIDIA GPUs conflicting with each other.

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System76 says I can do the 6000 Pro and the 5080 with the supplied power brick, but the concern would be thermals and cooling…