To Say I Enjoy DIY Is Probably an Understatement
My 1952 Craftsman is becoming a smart building testbed — five-zone HVAC, PoE-powered sensors, energy monitoring. When your day job is smart buildings, your house becomes the lab.
My wife has a rule: no new projects until the current one is finished. I have a counter-rule: every finished project reveals the next one.
To say I enjoy DIY is probably an understatement. Growing up in a blue-collar family in Kansas City, I didn't know any different. Need a new addition? You built it yourself. Replacing tile floors? Get the fam and get it done. That mindset never left me, even as my day job shifted from pulling cable to designing smart building architectures at Cisco.
The latest project started as a simple HVAC replacement. Our 20-year-old condenser failed, and I used it as an opportunity to design and install a five-zone 24 SEER split heat pump in our 1952 Craftsman. Occupancy-based zone controls, per-room temperature management, the works.
But HVAC was just the beginning.
The House as a Lab
When you spend your days talking to CRE executives about data-driven building operations, you start looking at your own house differently. Every system becomes a potential integration point. Every inefficiency becomes a project.
Right now I'm running PoE-powered environmental sensors in most rooms... temperature, humidity, CO2. The data feeds into a local dashboard that I built on a Raspberry Pi (powered by PoE, naturally). I can see exactly how each zone of the HVAC system responds to occupancy changes and outdoor conditions.
Is this overkill for a three-bedroom Craftsman? Absolutely. But it's the same architecture pattern we recommend to our commercial customers, just at a smaller scale. And there's nothing like living with a system 24/7 to understand its strengths and edge cases.
Where Home and Work Converge
The smart building industry talks a lot about convergence... bringing HVAC, lighting, security, and IT onto a common network. That convergence is happening at home too, just more organically.
My home network now carries data for climate control, lighting automations, security cameras, and energy monitoring alongside the usual internet traffic. It's a microcosm of the IT/OT convergence we're helping customers navigate at enterprise scale.
The most useful insight from running this at home? The challenge is rarely technical. It's operational. Getting systems to share data is straightforward. Getting them to share data usefully... in a way that actually changes how you operate the space... that's the hard part. And it's the same at home or in a 500,000 square foot office building.
I spent 50% less than a commercially quoted system and got a bunch of new tools, my EPA 608 certification, and a smart building testbed that I walk through every day. Not a bad trade.