A Roof-First Design Approach to Building a Net-Positive Energy Home – GreenBuildingAdvisor

Green Building Blog

How a retired couple in Lanesboro, Minn., realized their “Forever Home”

Mary Bell and Joe Deden describe themselves as environmentalists, first and foremost. Bell has a background in gardening and has authored numerous books about food dehydrating, Deden is the former director of Eagle Bluff Environmental Learning Center, which he also founded. After retiring a few years ago, they decided to recast their daily lives with as much sustainability and thoughtfulness as their means allowed, and fortunately for them, those means allowed their grand vision for an efficient, all-electric, and net-positive energy house to come to fruition. Their new “Forever Home” is in the sleepy town of Lanesboro, in southeastern Minnesota, the part of the state where “Land of 10,000 Lakes” feels like a misnomer. The home features a 32 kW DC-capacity photovoltaic array comprising Tesla solar shingles, a 13.5 kWh Tesla Powerwall, an integrated SPAN smart electrical panel, a Zehnder energy-recovery ventilator (ERV), and an air-to-water heat pump that connects to in-floor hydronic loops for ambient heating and cooling.

The wow factor permeates every corner of the home, both inside and out. The soaring, high-pitched roof, however, represents the linchpin around which the entire house was built. “We designed the house around the roof,” Deden says.

Taking a roof-first approach

Before purchasing the expansive 1.1-acre lot in 2022, Deden and Bell did their homework and then some. The couple’s previous home had traditional rack-mounted solar panels that were invariably covered in snow through most of the winter months. “Their metal edges tended to freeze, and that ice keeps the snow in place,” Deden says. For their future home, the prospect of “a reasonably steep roof” took hold, even leading them to consider designing it with a single pitch at 45°, which would have lent this hypothetical chalet-like house an oversized north-facing wall.

A more practical solution prevailed in the end, without foregoing the homeowners’…