backyardaware.craft
Backyard-Aware Craft — local-first home automation

Plano · Frisco · DFW · North Texas

Your sprinklers are watering a lawn that doesn't need it.

We fix that with a local-only Home Assistant brain wired into your sprinklers, HVAC, and pool. Real soil-moisture sensors and your own backyard weather station — not a calendar, not a cloud account — decide when to water, when to hold off before a storm, and when to take shelter from lightning. Hardware lives in your mechanical room and keeps working through internet outages, power flickers, and the slow death of any vendor's API. Every decision is an entity you can see.

Not ready for a visit? Text or call 469-298-8820 with a question.

Three reasons it matters here

01 · Water

Soil tells the sprinkler when to run.

Texas drought rules don't care about your lawn schedule. We replace your sprinkler controller with a local-control one and drive it from real soil-moisture sensors, current rain rate, and the 5-day forecast — watering driven by what your dirt actually needs.

02 · HVAC

Your AC cools the rooms you're actually in.

The HVAC policy reads Apple Home Away mode and your iPhone's Sleep Focus — so it cools the living room when you're awake in it, the bedroom when you're sleeping, and stops trying to please the hallway thermostat. Up to 2°F better where you actually are. Evening comfort after sunset, without you touching anything.

03 · Privacy

Nothing phones home. Literally.

No Honeywell cloud. No Ecowitt cloud. No GPS shared with a Companion app. Every device runs on a Raspberry Pi in your mechanical room. The same local setup also gives you backyard lightning alerts on the HomePod and holds the AC compressor through power flickers — protection that doesn't need the internet to work.

Bundles, briefly.

Two starting points, two add-ons, one bundled all-in-one. Most full-bundle installs in Plano land between $5,500 – $6,999 depending on yard size and existing wiring.

Water
Irrigation only
Pi · gateway · soil sensors · local sprinkler control. Half-day install.
$2,300 – $2,900
Climate
HVAC + storm
Pi 5 · Z-Wave thermostat · outdoor station + lightning · HVAC policy.
$3,650 – $5,000
↓ reuses Climate's Pi + gateway
Add-ons
Irrigation · Pool
Bolt onto Climate. Soil-driven sprinkler · pool temp + alerts.
Irrigation +$1,325–2,200
Pool +$299
Whole Property
Climate + Irrigation + Pool
Bundled and discounted vs. buying separately.
$4,900 – $6,999

Every install includes 30 days of policy tuning. Annual maintenance available from $180 / year — we come out once a year whether you ask or not.

Full breakdown of what each bundle includes →

What "observable" actually means.

A typical "smart" thermostat is a black box: you can ask it for the current setpoint, and that's about it. Our HVAC policy exposes every step of the computation as a named entity in Home Assistant — which room it's optimizing for, how that room compares to the hallway sensor, what the dewpoint bias is doing, why a lightning hold is engaged. Open the dashboard, and it tells you exactly why it just did what it did.

What's underneath

sensor.hvac_active_mode          home
sensor.hvac_comfort_room         living_room
sensor.hvac_room_delta           +1.4°F   # room minus hallway
sensor.hvac_room_vs_target       -0.6°F   # room minus target
sensor.hvac_active_cool_target   73.4°F
binary_sensor.hvac_lightning_hold off

What you see

Home Assistant climate dashboard showing the Honeywell T6 thermostat, HVAC policy debug entities (mode, room, room-vs-hallway delta, room-vs-target delta, cool and heat setpoints), and per-room temperature, humidity, and dewpoint readings

Presence and room selection come from your iPhone's Sleep Focus and Apple Home Away mode — no GPS, no Companion-app location permissions, nothing leaves the property.

How we stand behind the work.

Every install comes with a 90-day response commitment. If any automation behaves in a way you didn't expect, the founder shows up — in person or remotely — and fixes it. Not a vendor call-center: the same engineer who designed your system. The config is yours, readable, and portable, so you can take over the system yourself any time.

Built on the same reliability-engineering principles that hold up big-tech financial infrastructure and production automation used by thousands of engineers — applied to your HVAC and irrigation.

Plano homeowner with a pool, a lawn, and a water bill that climbs every summer?

30–45 minutes on-site. We look at your existing setup and send you a written scope with a fixed number. No obligation. Most people find it useful even if they don't move forward.

Request a walkthrough

Not ready for a visit? Text or call 469-298-8820 — or see it running first.