Hi everyone. I'm looking for a device to install Home Assistant on to manage a smart thermostat, a programmable light bulb (on and off), and another lamp in my house. Since I'll be doing other work in the future, I want to use Home Assistant to be ready for the future.

That said, I'm looking for a device (a Mini PC, a Pi, etc.) that consumes very little power, as I'll be using it exclusively for this purpose. Do you have any suggestions? Thank you in advance!

Can't go wrong with a pi. I'm using a pi4 for mine with a sonoff usb ZigBee dongle. Can't give you accurate power consumption but it'll be fairly minimal I would think.

I used to run it on a pi. I got a nuc 11 a while back so I could upgrade the ram/storage. But never had a real issue with either.

Home assistant also makes the green and yellow.. I don't have them, but they don't seem to consume much energy.

https://www.home-assistant.io/green/

https://www.home-assistant.io/yellow

If running Home Assistant is all you are going to do, Pi is enough. There's also official hardware with Home Assistant preinstalled: Home Assistant Green

They don’t make the yellow anymore, the green is good from what I hear though if you are just looking for home assistant and don’t expect to add a bunch of other apps to it (z2mqtt, node-red, etc.).

Beware, HomeAssistant absolutely eats SD cards.

A pi booting from an SD card is a good way to test it out, but HA does so much logging and other writing to storage that the write limit on the card gets used up very quickly. Took my setup only like a month or two to die when I first started with HA.

If you want to run HAOS on a pi long-term, you will need to set up a different boot drive that can handle more lifetime writes.

My pi3+ has been running for 8+ years on the same card. I ran out of processing and ram before the sd gave out. I only buy top-notch a2 cards.

I just upgraded to a pi5. To handle all of the integrations and devices I've added over the years. Still plan to stay on the sd until the price of other options comes down again.

I second the green recommendation. Works great out of the box.

This is a great point. My pi setup is a nas with the os running on a physical drive

Would be a good idea to check how close you are to the write limit, then. Pricier cards have a higher write limit, but all SD cards are limited.

Luckily, once you hit the limit, it turns read-only, so you can move to a new card pretty easy, but it will happen eventually.

Neat to know you've got a longer life out of the card you bought, though! I'll have to look into cards that have a higher write limit for my next Pi project!

To add a question to OPs question, is there an instance that has a HomeAssistant channel? Or smart home in general? I thought I saw one at one point...

Any newer Pi should be fine for a basic setup. I ran HA on a raspberry pi 3 B for years with no performance issues.