We just wanted to use the yard we'd saved for.
No chemicals. No trade-offs. A backyard our kids and our dog could actually live in.
We're Chris and Sandra — husband and wife, one daughter, and a dog named Murphy. A few years ago we bought a little house just outside Savannah, GA, with the backyard we'd always wanted.
We couldn't use it. The mosquitoes off the marsh were so bad we were stuck inside by 6pm all summer. We tried everything — sprays, foggers, hanging zappers, even a $300 propane trap that needed refills every few weeks. The chemical ones all carried the same warning: "keep children and pets away from treated areas." We were coating the exact ground our daughter played on and our dog licked.
The night our daughter came inside with a rash after we'd fogged the yard, we threw all of it out. We'd rather have the mosquitoes than poison our own backyard.
Here's where it turned. Chris installs solar panels for a living — it's his trade, and he thinks in terms of sunlight and circuits. He kept coming back to the same thought: if a single panel can power a whole house, surely it could run something that quietly killed bugs all night. No chemicals. No propane to refill. No subscription to pay forever.
So on nights and weekends, he went deep on mosquitoes — how they hunt, where they actually fly, and why nothing we owned was working. One fact reframed the entire problem.
Mosquitoes don't fly high. The ones that bite you stay within about three feet of the ground. But every zapper we'd hung up was doing its job six feet in the air — quietly frying moths and beetles while the mosquitoes cruised along below it, completely untouched. We hadn't been buying bad products. We'd been fighting in the wrong zone the entire time.
So Chris built for the right one. A solar unit that stakes in low, at the height the biting bugs actually fly — powered by the sun, so it costs nothing to run and never needs a refill. He wrapped the electric grid in a protective grating so Murphy and our daughter could stand right next to it safely. He made it fully weatherproof to live outside year-round. And he tuned it to pull in and kill the bugs that were actually ruining our summers.
Two summers of prototypes later, it worked. The first night it cleared our patio, we ate dinner outside as a family for the first time all summer. We built GroundGuard for our family — it turned out a lot of other families needed the same thing.