The rack in the garage was a bargain. Forty-two units, on castors, free if I collected it. That last word should have been a warning. I borrowed a van, talked a friend into one end of it, and discovered that a steel rack is not heavy in the way that a wardrobe is heavy. It is heavy in the way that intends you harm.
It has been in the garage for a year now and I mostly love it. But there are regrets, and they are the kind worth writing down so somebody else doesn't repeat them.
The first is the garage itself. Garages are not climate-controlled, and a garage in a British winter sits at single digits whilst a garage in July does not. The kit copes, but condensation is the quiet killer. Warm air, cold metal, a film of water on a switch's backplane: that is how you lose hardware slowly without ever seeing a dramatic failure. I added a cheap hygrometer and a small dehumidifier on a smart plug, triggered above 65% relative humidity, and the problem went away. I should have done that on day one.
The second is noise, or rather my naive belief that noise wouldn't matter "out there". 1U servers are designed to be heard over a datacentre, not over a quiet Sunday. The garage shares a wall with the spare room. I have since swapped the screaming Deltas in two boxes for Noctua fans and accepted the higher temperatures, and replaced one 1U pizza box entirely with a quieter tower build. Lesson: buy for the room you have, not the room you wish you had.
The third is power. I ran the whole thing off a single domestic ring for months before I sat down and actually added up the draw. A rack will happily pull more than you expect, and a UPS that protects against a flicker is not the same as a circuit that won't trip under sustained load. I now have a metered PDU and a sensible idea of my steady-state wattage, which is around 280W idle and a good deal more when I'm being silly with it.
What I'd do differently is smaller. I did not need 42U. I needed about 12, and the rest is now a very expensive shelf for cardboard boxes and a bicycle. A half-height rack would have fit a cupboard indoors, stayed warm and dry, and not required a van.
Would I undo it? No. There is something genuinely satisfying about a tidy rack with labelled cables and a single tidy run back to the patch panel. But the romance is in the cable management, not the forty-two units, and you can have the former without the latter.