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 house is decorated in grad-student style. Most of the furniture is donated, and the artwork ranges from an old pinball machine face to indigenous art from the couple’s travels to various countries including Mexico, Peru, India and Nepal. "India had a big influence on us," Rebekah says. "That was the first time we realized how badly the environment was being destroyed, and how Americans are so rich."

Stephen Hren stands in front of a newly installed solar panel, which will help liberate his home from carbon emissions.

Photo: Wessel Kok

Their international travel days are pretty much in the past now because, while Rebekah still flies to teach solar installation courses, Stephen has stopped completely. They conducted a cross-country summer book tour by train, and they’ll travel by boat to a family Christmas vacation in Mexico. "Flying started to seem like an extension of driving, and they’re both totally unsustainable," Stephen tells me later. "It’s impossible for planes to exist without fossil fuels. The other thing is the whole egalitarian aspect. Only 5 percent of the world population has ever flown."

When Stephen returns from his errands, still dry, he gives me a tour of the exterior projects. They installed a metal roof because it facilitates rainwater collection and it’s also a natural radiant barrier, keeping the house cooler in the summer. They created a green roof, a catch-all term for any roof with vegetation on it, using pond liners and planters. That also helps to reduce their roof temperature, gives them an attractive patio space and even supplies cooking ingredients in the form of sage, thyme and rosemary.

But the most attention-getting transformation is the sprawling garden on the one-third-acre (some 1,000-square-metre) lot. The former lawn is a startlingly healthy and unruly mix of vegetables (many perennials), fruit trees, cooking herbs, medicinal herbs, berries and nuts. A horizontal shading trellis of muscadine vines snaking along the western side of the house partly covers peeling white paint. "A lot of people in the city don’t even think about doing this, but things grow really well here," he says. "One day this jogger ran by and stopped in his tracks and said, ‘It never occurred to me you could have fruit trees in the city.’ And he knew everything about fruit trees."

Putting edible plants in your garden is one of the most important things to do when you want to go zero-carbon. Here, Rebekah Hren checks on the status of the herbs.

Photo: Wessel Kok

Much of the design, planting and tending of the garden is credited to their friends and tenants, Kyra Moore and Keith Shaljian, who rent the in-law apartment. The couple operates Bountiful Backyards, a company that provides edible landscaping, and lately Stephen’s part-time employer. Their apartment is set up to use some of the Hrens’ solar power.

Today Rebekah has to do a few hours of fieldwork to check on a solar installation job she did with her employer Honey Electric Solar. We take off in the Mercedes, which the Hrens converted to run on used fryer oil instead of diesel. A friend did the conversion using an Elsbett kit, a German invention that, by modifying the fuel injectors, allows the original fuel tank to be used with any combination of veggie oil, biodiesel and standard diesel. We arrive at a suburban house to check on the 2,800-watt photovoltaic system she and her partners had recently spent three days installing. "We like to come and turn it on ourselves, but it was a sunny weekend and the owner couldn’t wait," she says.

Rebekah, who teaches photovoltaic installation through Solar Energy International, says women are a rarity in the business. "I talk to customers about the system on the phone and do the emailing, but when I go to the house to do the work, they’re usually surprised."

While the Hrens have their individual jobs (Stephen also writes fiction), much of what they do is together. "They’ve definitely always worked as a team, or they could never have done all they’ve done," says Kelly Dimock, who has been close to Rebekah since they were 13. She was there when Stephen courted Rebekah, when he was 17 and she was 16. While he eventually won her over, both sets of parents were wary, especially after the young lovers ran away in Stephen’s car a couple months before he was to graduate from high school and Rebekah was a junior.

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