A tech enthusiast says that they managed to put together a home lab-worthy Proxmox server using PC parts scavenged from the nearby county landfill. Furthermore, Tsuto told fellow Redditors that they now routinely raid the dump’s separate electronics recycling area once a week. We can’t blame them; their gallery of liberated hardware includes plenty of valuable trinkets like SSDs, HDDs, GPUs, even RAM, complete laptops, and more.

‘It’s wild what people throw away these days,’ says the successful tech scavenger. Tsuto seems to admit that many of the bits and pieces are “on the older end,” but even folks paying cold, hard cash at retail in 2026 are competing for components like RTX 3060s, AM4 motherboards/CPUs, and DDR4. That’s how hard the components shortage is hitting folks.

Tsuto also seems rather pleased with an Asus ROG laptop found at the landfill site. “The Asus ROG laptop just needed a $25 battery off Amazon and still has decent enough specs for casual gaming for my son,” they comment. Pixel peeping Tsuto’s gallery indicates that this portable gaming laptop packs an Intel Core i7-4710HQ (4C/8T) supported by 16GB of RAM, and allied with a GeForce GTX 860M 2GB GPU. It will be playing less demanding titles such as Stumble Guys, we see.

In a follow-up post, the Redditor explains that one of their home lab projects that has been built from the dumpster finds includes a Proxmox server. It’s a dusty-looking machine (it’s a shame Tsuto hasn’t found an air duster yet?), but it is ample for their needs. The ‘new’ Proxmox machine is said to pack in “Two mirrored 256GB SSDs for the OS, one extra 1TB SSD for fast storage, and three 2TB HDDs in RAID1 for ZFS storage.”

Despite the lavish tech finds from this landfill, Tsuto says they actually bought some key components off Amazon to finalize the system – a Core i7-7700 and 64GB of RAM. We hope the RAM wasn’t bought in recent months, with the prices as they are.

Where I live, you might as well rob a bank as try and swipe electronics from the local council recycling centers. There’s security and cameras around these trash = treasure hoards, which can be particularly appealing to folks who appreciate retro computing.

A self-taught electronics tinkerer called Mike recently shared details of his retro-computing project on Hackaday. It certainly is retro, as the design eschews modern computer component niceties like microprocessors or microcontrollers. Instead, Mike’s computer is “a modern 8-bit design, built with recycled 1950s vacuum tubes.” It uses 460 Soviet-era 6N3P (Cyrillic 6Н3П-ЕВ) double triode tubes, which were manufactured around 50 years ago, combined with era-appropriate germanium diodes.

The wall-mounted vacuum tube-based computer you see in the video above is apparently the third tube computer Mike has engineered this decade. Previous iterations have sometimes come to an explosive end…

Of course, there have been a number of famous historically significant computers based on arrays of these tubes or valves, which offer similar functionality to the transistors that largely succeeded them. There are plenty of reasons the computer industry moved from tubes to transistors, and then silicon ICs, but enthusiasts aren’t bound by such practicalities.

Mike notes a few drawbacks with vacuum tubes, actually. Most notably, this simple 8-bit computer design needs 460 of these fragile, rather bulky, white-hot glowing tubes to run. Furthermore, these used/old stock 6N3P models only have about a 500-hour operational life, so a few handy spares are required, as is a stepladder to reach the whole array of tubes, which may fizzle out at any time. The tubes run hot, so Mike's computer room is always toasty whether the season makes that a nice thing or not. A fire extinguisher is always kept handy, and the room smells of burning dust.

Performance and capabilities are about as limited as one might expect. Mike notes that starting The Tube Computer (MK3) means waiting 10 to 15 mins after power-on for the machine to literally warm up. This is followed by a mandatory reset to get the tubes into a unified operational state.

For compute functionality, Mike’s Tube Computer architecture uses an arithmetic logic design to perform just the five essential functions needed for its instruction set (sum, carry, not, increment, and XNOR). Meanwhile, its instruction cycle relies on a non-pipelined architecture with a six-step fetch and single-execute cycle.

Components:

• 460 × 6N3P vacuum tube
• 46 × 10 tube pcbs
• 1 × 190cmx130cm 4mm acrylic panel
• 3 × 2m 30mmx30mm Aluminium box section
• 5 × Backplane pcbs

User interaction with this wall-mounted homemade computer varies depending on the program in use. Currently, Mike has it set up to run an Airship Simulator piloting a British R80 airship from Brighton to Paris. “By pressing controls on the image of the bridge of the R80, you can direct the airship software,” says Mike. “These membrane buttons simply put 5 volts directly to the input board of The Tube Computer. You can control the ballast, gas release, engine power, elevators, rudder and the bow mooring gear, which is used to release the airship from the tower.”

Another charming feature of this admittedly “build it now, fix it later” computer design is the very audible accompanying ex-British Rail flip-digit display. That add-on will invoke another entirely different flavor of nostalgia for some of our readers.

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This particular kit is an upgraded version of the one we've seen Hoto sell over recent months, with more driver bits and a more robust case for users. The 40% discount isn't quite a record low, but it's on the lower end of the scale, and it's still a good price for the kit you're getting here. This is a good upgrade for a PC builder or hobbyist, as well as for any DIY tasks at home.

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