I moved away from pihole because every time I had a fiddle, I bought down the DNS of my whole house, resulting in lots of stressed children :) the solution I switched to is against the ethos of this sub, but it’s good and worth the cost.

I would risk it. After all, it’s the only thing protecting my entire gitlab account. If someone could break my ssh, they could do what they want to my gitlab presence,and I’m guessing someone at gitlab is paid and qualified to make that call.

Have dropped from 500w (2 x R710) to 50-60w (5600X, 32Gb, 2 nvme drives, 3 sata SSDs, Coursir Platinum PSU, Gigabyte Mobo

Plus in the lab, I have a ONT and a small network switch (replacing a managed one saved 20w or so), and a work laptop, which brings the at the wall consumption of the entire lab to around 80-90w

Id be interested to see how folk with the Athlon processors are getting so much less power usage than me

I used k3s and use the same node as master and runner. I started off with 3 nodes like you are planning, but soon discovered they for home use it just adds overhead in keeping up to date and backing up, and I had to find some way of doing persistent storage without standing up yet another VM as a NFS host, so downsized to a single node.