About TechFuel HQ

Who runs this site

TechFuel HQ is run by Lowell K. Wood IV (byline: LK Wood IV) from St. Louis County, Missouri. About thirteen years of homelab and PC tinkering, starting with game-server hosting (Garry’s Mod, then Arma 3, then Squad), now applied to writing the homelab and self-hosting guides I wish I had read when I started.

I answer every email I get at hello@techfuelhq.com.

What this site is for

Most homelab and self-hosting content is either content-farm filler or vendor-paid product placement. The goal here is straight-talk hardware recommendations, real cost-of-ownership math, and configuration patterns that hold up after the YouTube hype cycle ends.

No sponsored articles. No vendor samples in exchange for coverage. No affiliate-first writing where the recommendation gets shaped by the commission. When affiliate links are present, they are disclosed at the top of the article and never change which product gets the recommendation.

What the site covers

  • Proxmox, TrueNAS, and Unraid — operating-system tradeoffs for homelabs
  • Mini PCs and small-form-factor builds (MS-01, ASUS NUC line, used OptiPlex / EliteDesk Tiny / ThinkCentre Tiny)
  • 2.5GbE and 10GbE on a budget — used Mellanox cards, DACs, MikroTik switches
  • Self-hosted apps that meaningfully replace SaaS — Immich, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Jellyfin, Paperless-ngx, Home Assistant
  • Repurposing older hardware (gaming PCs, retired workstations) as servers
  • Power consumption, idle wattage, and total cost of ownership — because electricity is not free

How testing is done

Every hardware recommendation goes through the same bench in St. Louis County. Idle and load power are measured with a P3 P4400 Kill A Watt. Network throughput is measured with iperf3, three trials, median reported. Storage IOPS are measured with fio against the actual filesystem the article recommends. Vendor spec-sheet numbers are labeled as such, separately from numbers I measured myself.

No vendor samples are accepted. Every device covered on this site was bought with my own money or pulled from my own retired-gear pile. If that ever changes, the article will say so at the top.

How articles are produced — AI tooling disclosure

I want this on the record explicitly because it matters: TechFuel HQ articles are written with AI assistance. The pipeline is:

  1. Research — assisted by ChatGPT Deep Research (OpenAI). Used to gather public benchmarks, vendor documentation, release notes, and community-reported issues. Every cited number is followed back to a primary source URL before it enters an article.
  2. Drafting — assisted by Claude Opus (Anthropic). Used to organize the research into article structure and a first prose draft.
  3. Editing and bench verification — done by Lowell K. Wood IV. Every article is read end-to-end, every measured number is checked against the actual bench output, every claim about a piece of hardware is verified against gear I have on hand or against a primary-source URL. Articles do not publish until I have signed off.

The same disclosure appears in the methodology link in the site footer and in a “How I tested” block at the bottom of every article that involves measurement.

Public operations directory

Internal site operations — the changelog, agent registry, AdSense state, GSC state, risks, and Council decision log — live in a public /ops/ directory in the site repo on GitHub. That directory is the canonical record of how decisions on this site get made and why. It is intentionally readable by anyone, including AdSense reviewers.

The repository is at github.com/iBlessi/techfuelHQ.

Editorial principles

  • Vote a recommendation. Hedging is for politicians.
  • Cite real sources. Made-up benchmarks are worse than no benchmarks.
  • Disclose affiliate relationships clearly, near the top of every article that has any.
  • Update articles when the underlying facts change. Note the update date.
  • Mark physical-hardware claims with a verifiable artifact, or leave them out.
  • AI does not get a byline on this site. People do.

Contact

Email: hello@techfuelhq.com Location: St. Louis County, Missouri, United States Site author: Lowell K. Wood IV (LK Wood IV)

Last updated: 2026-05-08.