Power couple

Rebekah and Stephen Hren took a 75-year-old house and turned it into a model zero-carbon home. Here’s how.

Diane Daniel | September 2008 issue

The couple have chronicled the project in their recently published The Carbon-Free Home: 36 Remodeling Projects to Help Kick the Fossil-Fuel Habit. While the book, published by Chelsea Green, is presented as a how-to home manual, it’s really a lifestyle makeover guide, including chapters on food, landscaping, transportation and travel, along with appliances, refrigeration, hot water and heating and cooling. The couple relays technical information in a down-to-earth, conversational way, sharing many personal experiences.

For two days and a night I was Rebekah and Stephen’s house guest so I could see what it means to live "carbon-free," using only sustainable-energy alternatives. I ate homegrown or farm-fresh meals, recharged my laptop with solar energy, showered with water warmed by a solar water heater and rode in a waste-oil-fuelled 1977 300D diesel Mercedes (which the couple, now on "car sabbatical," has sold). I also availed myself of the "humanure" toilet, and was taught to sprinkle fragrant pine sawdust over my deposits. (There’s a flush toilet for modern-day traditionalists.)

By the end of my stay, Stephen and Rebekah had convinced me that carbon-free living is attainable if effortful. It also helps tremendously if you can live without air conditioning and do part of the reconfiguring work yourself. Stephen is a restoration carpenter and lately has been working with an edible-garden and landscape business. Rebekah, a licensed electrical contractor, installs solar systems and can do her fair share of plumbing. However, to the authors’ credit, more than half of the book’s projects require only basic skills or none at all, with some as simple as growing vegetables or sealing drafts.

I first heard about the Hrens, who live only a couple miles from me, when someone mentioned the rural home they built several years earlier out of cob, a traditional mix of clay, sand and straw, where they lived off the grid for six years. Through that massive DIY effort (done with many hours of help from friends and family), they developed their building skills. But this escape-to-the-country experience is also what prompted the two, who’ve been on a counterculture path together since high school, to return to urban living. Removed from family, friends and job sites, they were dismayed to discover that car travel offset their energy savings. As they write in their book’s introduction, "It was time to learn from our mistakes and move back to the city, a city that had oodles of existing houses just waiting for a good retrofit."

On the morning I report for my sleepover, the first thing the Hrens do is show me to the sizable guest room, which has doors leading to a shared bathroom and a green-roof patio. I get a quick lesson in the six-month-old humanure system, which they stress is optional. "Some people are freaked out by it," Rebekah says.

The setup, which works like a litter box, consists of a wooden bench holding a toilet seat half-filled with sawdust and next to that a container of more sawdust for replenishment. You do your business and cover it. The couple composts the remains in the backyard.

The neighbourhood the Hrens moved to, Old North Durham, is a hodgepodge of lower-income and middle-class homes, many built in the early- to mid-1900s, some restored. "One reason we picked our house is it had a big south-facing roof," perfect for the solar panels, Stephen says.

Having grown up in nearby Raleigh, the couple gravitated to Durham several years after graduating in 1998 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The city of 209,000, with its working-class past in textiles and tobacco, racial diversity (50 percent white, 40 percent black, 8 percent Hispanic), top-notch Duke University and high-tech centre, Research Triangle Park, is a magnet for liberal types who appreciate its scrappy attitude and affordable real estate.

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