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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.

The Hrens use a solar oven to cook their dishes. Potatoes and stews can cook all day in this homemade cooker, which reaches 300 degrees fahrenheit (150 degrees celsius).

Photo: Wessel Kok

In the morning, Stephen and I head off to work with Bountiful Backyards after he sets out a pot of potatoes to cook all day in the homemade solar oven. The cooker, which looks like a box with a window, can reach 300 degrees Fahrenheit (150 Celsius) on a sunny day, hot enough to cook stews, roasts and even cookies.

"See that Bradford pear?" Stephen says when we arrive at the two-story house in a new development. "That tree will be dead in five years. It’s what every landscape person puts in." By the end of a full day in the backyard, the crew has installed a rain barrel, planted a fig tree and some flowering plants and constructed two spiral-shaped herb gardens.

Stephen is thrilled to see more mainstream folks moving toward sustainable living, including his brother Philip. "Stephen started sending me emails about peak oil five years ago, and it all sounded too crazy," says Philip Hren, a 48-year-old computer programmer who lives in nearby Cary. "Then I learned all the facts about oil and had an energy audit." Since then, he’s added insulation and a metal roof to his family’s home, and purchased a solar hot water heater and a Prius, all changes for which he says he owes Stephen.

Rebekah’s childhood friend Dimock, who credits the Hrens with inspiration for her own environmental changes, thinks the couple has a way of getting people’s attention. "They’ve got a magnetic draw," she says. "People meet them and think, ‘I don’t know anyone who’s done all these things and knows all these things.’ People like to be around people they learn from."

Rebekah’s mother, Linda Wharton of Raleigh, says her daughter and son-in-law "always had a vision about what they were going to do, but in the beginning it wasn’t clear where they were headed. I’m just in awe of what they’ve done."

When I ask the Hrens if they think the book could put them in demand as consultants and speakers, they concede it’s ­possible, but because they don’t fly it seems unlikely. "I think we have the ­responsibility to live the life we write about, doing what we said we were doing in the book," Stephen says. "Instead of travelling all over the place, we want to be active in our community."

Whatever the Hrens’ next project (one dream is to start a hybrid/alternative-fuel car-sharing co-operative), communicating their knowledge about it will remain a ­component. "You can do a lot yourself, but actually it’s really tiny," Stephen says. "You’re not going to make any kind of difference unless you go out and educate ­people. It’s really about changing society."

Rebekah and Stephen don’t expect their book to bring about wholesale change, but they do hope some readers will be moved to join them in what they feel is their "­moral obligation to act." In the quiet ­revolution that’s changing the way we produce and consume energy, their actions speak as loudly as their words.

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