Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
Knitting. Super cheap to start, you can pick up a set of needles and some acrylic yarn for under $20. But when you start getting into nice yarns and bigger pieces, you are spending hundreds of dollars on yarn alone for a blanket or a sweater. And you want nice needles in all sizes as well as all types (double pointed, regular and circular)… more hundreds of dollars.
Moral of the story is if a friend knits you something with nice yarn, please appreciate it. Lots of effort and thought went into it.
Just started crocheting, and I’m just holding myself back from buying all the yarn, it’s gonna get bad
My mom knits and she spends way more time unraveling thrift store finds to salvage the yarn than she does actually knitting stuff.
Electronics / microcontrollers.
Took just a few months to go from, “I can make a wifi connected weather station for like $20 in components!?” to “oscilloscopes cost how much?”
Has there already grown a noteworthy Arduino/ESP Community on Lemmy?
There are quite a few but none are super active.
Self-hosting apps / homelab
Getting used enterprise gear is not prohibitively expensive, but the electric bills balloon very quickly.
I currently bought an old desktop from a friend that I use as my Homeserver.
- I bought 3 HDDs for storage
- I rent a VPS
- I rented Proton to host mail for my domain, but switched to netcup groupware because that sucked.
- Some domains
- Electricity
Wow I thought it was way more.
One time costs: ~500€ Monthly costs: ~15€ Plus electricity, but I have solar. I assume it’s about 150€/year
But I’m a cheap selfhosted, but eventually, I will have a huge ass Enterprise Level Rack in my basement.
Growing cannabis (legal here in Canada)
…anyone can grow weed. Growing GOOD weed is an art.
I unintentionally grow weed because I made some tincture for grandma.
Now it just grows on my garden and I can’t get rid of it.
2000 into my fully automated hydroponic weed factory. Another 500 to make my nutrient solutions from scratch. Mind you that 500 dollars when making from scratch likely last 20 years of crops. It does make a good 1.5 pounds of dry weed every 3 to 4 months with the for legal plants allowed in Canada. I barely smoke so give nearly all away.
Three year prior, harvested a crop down right before going to Mexico for three month trip. Was still some shoots barely growing so for shits and giggles I turn the lights back to 22 hours per day to see if they would go back to the veg state. Have camera so can watch it remotely. Shit starts fully growing like a new plant. Anyhow COVID puts a wrinkle in my return. Ended up in Mexico for 18 months. Over that time, thing kept growing like nuts. Automation on water replacement and nutrient injection along with pH monitoring. Became sort of a how long can this thing go with near zero human intervention. Had only to send my brother in law in three times to cut it down and refill my nutrient injectors from solutions I made before leaving.
Board games. Things get expensive once you start collecting
For me it is maybe camping.
I just tested my new sleeping bag - under 0.5kg rated to -5°C. And realised that I bought/ replaced lots of gear to higher quality gear over few years.
I needed a new saucepan.
I’ve now replaced half my kitchen.
Coffee.
I blame James Hoffman entirely.
Within a year I went from:
Drinking instant coffee at home, but really enjoying “proper coffee”
To
Buying a cafetiere (~£15) + preground coffee
To
Buying a Nespresso (~£60 on offer) + pods
To
Buying a budget espresso machine (~£120) + preground coffee
To
Wasting my money on a cheap manual coffee grinder (~£50) + beans
To
Immediately replacing it with an entry level Sage grinder (~£170)
To
Buying an entry Level “proper” espresso machine (~£700)
It took me a good 2-3 weeks of practicing and dialling in before pulling a good shot of coffee that I’d actually want to drink, but by that point it was also about learning a new skill, learning how different aspects of the process affect the end result and learning how to make all sorts of different espresso-based drinks.
My girlfriend thought I was nuts at first, but a year or so later even she agrees it was worth the investment. I still for the life of me can’t get the hang of latte art though.
The problem is now though that I’m a waaaay more critical of coffee from coffee shops, because I spent a long time making bad coffee whilst learning!
I will buy a Ubiquiti edge router to move away from the consumer grade network gear, turned into just one more $500 server to complete my homelab cluster. Oh who am I kidding the homelab is never “complete”.
Watercolor.
Children play with $5 palettes. Apparently I pay $20 for a single color tube.
Tinkering with electronics. Like, breadboards, integrated circuits, transistors, microcontrollers.
I’ve got a tacklebox full to bursting with components and parts worth probably close to a grand.
3D printing. Purchased a cheap 3D printer to save money printing things instead of buying things. 5 printer print farm later, no idea why I’m doing this to myself.
Started out with a raspberry pi several years ago. Got my feet wet with entry level, beginner friendly NAS prebuilds. Hunted for recycled computer parts. Now searching for and actively acquiring enterprise gear that is making a massive dent in my wallet.
selfhosting/homelab. Originally started just using retired gaming PC parts to build a server. All it cost was the power to run the system. Years later and with more things/content I have, I just added a 5x 18tb hard drives and 3x 8tb. Just the 5 18tb drives was like $1500.
Great post OP!
