Can you please tell me all about your DIY router?

Now that I have time for hobbies again I wanna dive right in to building up a home lab. Right now I just have a Netgear router that reached end of life, and a NAS i’d like to make accessible remotely, and a DIY router seems like the correct next step for me. I’m very interested in ad-blocking network wide and someday I’d like to host my own little webpage, but for now I’m really just barely getting started.

I’m information gathering, I don’t know what I don’t know and my networking skills are pretty weak anyway. But even if your needs and desires have nothing to do with mine, I also just like to hear people talk about their set ups. Please? 🌞

OpnSense running on an ex-lease HP i3-something SFF desktop. Added several cheap half-height GigEth PCIe cards for the LAN bridge.

It is way over spec for what OpnSense needs but it was cheap and extensible.

UPS power supply.

There’s a tangle of PoE injectors which makes me sad. PoE PCIe cards appear to be ludicrously expensive here for no apparent reason.

I’m gonna ask you the same question I’m asking everyone using office mini PCs, do you know what kind of power draw? I’m really into the idea of cheap, but I’m also getting super into green energy.