The second hand market for Lenovo laptops is usually pretty good. Lots of corporations have hardware cycles and recycle the things in huge waves. I’ve picked up an X230 and X270 for fractions of what they were worth new. Accessories too.

Recently I went through some pain with this myself. Had a full Heatmiser setup with wireless receivers in every room and 2 manifold controllers for our underfloor heating on two floors.

The devices ate batteries like nothing I’ve seen before and regularly dropped off the network and didn’t send call to heat signals properly, so I decided to switch out the thermostats for cheap ZigBee temperature sensors.

I then ordered a relay board from AliExpress with a baked in esp8266 cheap and flashed esphome onto it. These replaced my manifold controllers

After trial and error, I now have my heating system run by esphome and home assistant. It has been faultless! Will probably reinstall the Heatmiser kit if I sold the house though

I’ve been seeing them on YouTube. Amanda Holden is another one but that’s all I’ve seen so far. It might just be a collab for Britain’s Got (no) Talent or something

Did the same on my ThinkPad X270 last week. Went for Arch and everything worked out of the box. KDE Plasma + Wayland was a doddle too. Very happy!

It’s dual boot with Windows 10 for now but I think I’m ready to delete the Windows partitions already