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Power couple

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

Rebekah and Stephen Hren Handcrafted their eco-friendly home almost entirely by themselves. Atop the 1,400-square-foot home in Durham, North Carolina, they attached solar panels and created a green rooftop garden to match the green lawn below.

Photo: Wessel Kok

The Hrens’ corner house on a busy ­thoroughfare is nearly surrounded by small apartment buildings that have attracted communities of Latino families and workers. At 6 a.m. most days, a cacophony of beeping horns rips through the stillness as workers catch lifts to their constructions jobs. In the evening, Mexican music blares from the parking lot across the street. "It’s not really your typical neighbourhood," Stephen notes.

Today the sky is grey and the temperature is predicted to sink to an unseasonably low 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius), a drop of 16 degrees from ­yesterday. The house is still warm, so the ­windows stay open. The Hrens are planning to ­connect to the grid eventually, so they can feed ­power back to Duke Energy for credit. Any ­electrical production created by a system at a home, office or anywhere else that isn’t used by occupants can be fed "­backward" through the utility metre and sold to the local utility provider. "The ­panels are just sitting there waiting to send power," ­Rebekah says. "I feel so bad about wasting it."

For now, they’re reliant on the weather. "If we get three or four cloudy days in a row we need to be careful, like we won’t open and close the refrigerator much or watch a movie on the computer," says Rebekah, standing in the kitchen in stained cotton cut-offs and a faded T-shirt that shows up on Stephen that afternoon. The two, both slim and around 5’,7", often share tops and even jeans. They have matching 10th-anniversary tattoos, an electrical symbol of a double diode, or lightning arrester. ­"People in the solar industry call them lucky charms," Rebekah explains. "It means that the two of us together are more capable to deal with trauma and stress than we are apart."

She shows me their new appliance, an induction hot plate, around which a ­magnetic field is created to send an ­electrical current that heats only the pot and not the stove. "It’s my new favourite thing. It’s this crazy thing that works like a ­microwave?" she says, her voice occasionally rising in youthful upspeak. ­"Unfortunately, we didn’t know about it until after we’d finished the book." They also have a two-burner ethanol stove, and when the w­eather cools they use a wood-burning stove for heating and cooking.

Stephen, with a quick kiss and a "bye, sweetie" to his wife of 12 years, leaves on his bike to run some errands. "Be careful riding your bike in the rain," she calls out, having earlier reported a band of showers moving in.

Rebekah takes me through the kitchen, where the Hrens are having their first non-energy-related home-remodeling job done. For that, they arranged a labour trade with carpenter friend and former housemate Kevin Svara. Today’s excitement is that Svara will complete the kitchen cabinet and countertop of wheat board and bamboo plywood. Luckily, the area’s first green-building store opened just around the corner from the Hrens. "Common Ground being here makes it a lot easier," Rebekah says. "I think we’ve tried out almost everything they carry."

The kitchen also houses a compact dishwasher. Much of a dishwasher’s power goes into heating water, so the most energy-efficient ones have the shortest cycles, as well as a cold-water option. "Stephen was weirdly convinced it couldn’t beat washing [by hand], but it does. It only uses three gallons of water," says Rebekah. Stephen explains later that he had to think that one through. "I can have Luddite ­tendencies, but it does seem to be ­amazingly efficient."

The most critical apparatus in the kitchen isn’t for cooking. On the wall near the back door is the power metre, which Rebekah watches somewhat obsessively. "The house is drawing negative 3 amps," she declares, which means the house is using more power than it’s producing, a typical reading for a dark day.

The Hrens have a laundry list of energy-saving techniques and devices. They use a solar hot water heater and passive solar heating, which means allowing sunlight to come through windows (preferably facing true south in the northern hemisphere). This fall they’ll install a solar air heater, in which panels with air space are positioned south on the roof or the side of the house. When air from the house comes in contact with the panels, it’s warmed, and usually a fan is used to distribute the air throughout the house. In the kitchen, they collect greywater from their sink and ­front-loading washing machine in a 30-gallon tank outside to use for extra irrigation.

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