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Powered down: FSPA affiliate Marilyn Pedretti lives off grid

Marilyn Pedretti stands in the kitchen of her straw bale home.

FSPA affiliate Marilyn Pedretti’s home in the Town of Holland, just outside Holmen, Wis., looks like a typical ranch-style house with a garage. As you approach the home an enormous solar panel towering over her yard comes into focus. It’s one of the few outwardly-visible features indicative of what sets this house apart from other homes in the Coulee Region: this straw bale house is off the grid.

“When people hear I don’t have electricity coming out here, they think, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I want to come visit you, you won’t have indoor plumbing,’” says Marilyn, who moved into the house after Labor Day 2007. “The perception is if you’re not on grid, you’re primitive. I invite college groups and high school groups out here so they can see, yes, you can live off grid and have a pretty normal house.”

The idea to build an environmentally-friendly straw bale house came to Marilyn after she spent two years working in El Paso, Texas, where she helped build straw bale houses on the border. “They’re just booming all over, and I thought if they can build them in Canada, why can’t we build them in Wisconsin?” says Marilyn, who decided to move home to the Coulee Region and build one. “It just makes sense to do something a little more natural.”

That draw to do things naturally, says Marilyn, was borne out of her childhood spent on a farm. She believes she’s always been Franciscan, and she officially became an affiliate in 1996. “As an affiliate, the idea is to carry out the Franciscan values, and this is certainly my way to do it. It’s not for everybody. But I think when you do things intentionally it just makes a difference.”

In addition to utilizing solar power in her straw bale home, Marilyn also chose sustainable local building products when possible, rescued items bound for the landfill and shopped at auctions and second hand shops, like Habitat ReStore. She has an on-demand water heater which never stores heated water, and never runs cold. She unplugs appliances she’s not using, like the microwave, to limit “phantom watts:” energy burned by appliances when they are not in use. Energy savings are even built right in to the design and placement of the home, which faces south to capitalize on passive solar heat.

Marilyn is the first to admit that while she’s an environmentalist, she’s not perfect—and neither is her house. She’s still working out the bugs in the on-demand water heater, which has been drawing in cold air and freezing the pipes lately. And, she used pink foam insulation on the base of her home—for lack of a better option. But she is arguably a pioneer in straw bale homebuilding in this area of the United States, a term she hears often. “Sometimes I hear people say that and it just makes me laugh. But then I think pioneer might be a word, guinea pig might be another word,” she laughs.

Marilyn estimates the total cost to build her house is $60,000, plus the $15,000 solar panels, which are projected to pay for themselves in 10 years. Her hope is that the concept of green building catches on, whether in the form of straw bale homes or the many other environmentally-friendly options; and that people become more conscious of what they need versus what they’re building. “If this house can get people to stop and rethink, then that’s great.”

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