Tish Wilson chuckled as she recalled the sign a neighbor put up about 10 years ago suggesting a meeting to talk about bringing electricity to homes off N.M. 14 about three miles south of Madrid.

"The whole community went berserk," she said. Soon another sign went up reminding folks, "This is an alternative community."

The exact wording of the response, Wilson said, "took a long time," but the message was, if you want electricity delivered by PNM, "it's just down the road."

Wilson's husband, Dave Stephenson, and another property owner offered to give tours of their houses to show off the systems that power their lights and appliances.

Nobody brought up the issue again. The 80 or so homes west of the highway are still all "off the grid."

And that's just fine with Stephenson and Wilson.

Stephenson bought his first 20 acres (at $375 per acre) in 1977, when he was flush with earnings from a post-college job working on an offshore oil rig in the Persian Gulf. He later acquired three other parcels, bringing his total holdings to 180 acres in the old Mesita de Juana Lopez land grant. The property offers panoramic views of Placer Peak and the Ortiz Mountains.

"He wanted to be able to go naked and scream obscenities without having anyone see or hear him," Wilson said of her husband.

Stephenson, who was raised in Los Alamos where his father was an electrical engineer, pitched a tent on his land the day after closing and began building a 900-square-foot cabin from glass crates. He'd pull the nails out and reuse both the wood and the nails.

In 1982, he met Wilson and she eventually gave up her home in Cedar Crest and moved in with him. When she came home from work at night, they used the car battery to run the lights inside. "On weekends it would be a little tough," Stephenson said. In the winter, the pipes would sometimes freeze, but the place was cozy, even more so when their sons, Wes, 23, and Dwight, 21, were born and Stephenson set about building a larger place for the family.

(The cabin later became a hog shed where the boys kept a couple sows, a boar and as many as 30 pigs.)

Stephenson said he had always wanted to build his own home and was intrigued by adobe. "I never had a lot of money and dirt's cheap," he explained. But first he constructed a tin-roofed shop to practice the art of using adobe bricks.

As he designed the new house, Stephenson would walk around with string and pieces of Rebar, pounding them into the ground to mark the various rooms. "We walked the whole space," Wilson said. "What he eventually drew on paper was based on this."

But "there (still) is no blueprint," Stephenson laughed. "A lot was designed as we went up with the walls."

Construction was slow, however, because Stephenson was running a nursery business selling native trees, shrubs and plants and doing other jobs at the same time. And the adobes he was making in his spare time were melting into the ground.

Eventually they decided Wilson would continue to work — she was founding director of the Early Childhood Program at Santa Fe Community College — and Stephenson would become a stay-at-home dad, giving him more time to devote to the new house.

He and his younger son would drive his 1953 red Dodge 2-ton truck into the mountains to cut the latillas and vigas that were eventually incorporated into the three-bedroom, one-bathroom, 2,400-square-foot passive solar house. In five years, it was mostly completed, and in 1992 the family moved in.

The house is constructed from double adobes. Stephenson added straw bale to the north, east and west sides, making the walls 3 feet deep in many places. Because of the mass, there is little fluctuation in the interior temperatures.

Sun pours through four large double-paned, south-facing windows in the living room and another five windows in the master bedroom, heating up the adobe walls and brick floors. Three insulated clerestory windows bring light and warmth to the hallway.

Except for the windows (which cost about $3,000), almost all the materials in the house are secondhand. Stephenson bought a bridge from Sandia Park for $375 and used the timber for inside beams. He haunted salvage yards in Albuquerque and other places for secondhand doors, scrap wood, fixtures. He built the kitchen cabinets and much of the furniture for the house. The iron drawer pulls were hand-forged in his shop. He made the tinted cement countertops imbedded with flecks of turquoise, obsidian and even fossil. And the flagstone for the porch was collected from a friend's ranch nearby.

All the appliances, including a small, Avanti refrigerator ($249) and a Maytag Neptune washer, are energy saving, as is the "solar dryer" (clothesline) outside.

Energy to power the machines comes from the sun. A 1,000-watt array of five solar photovoltaic panels mounted on poles on the south side of the house collect and convert solar energy into electricity. Two of the panels track the sun during the day.

The electric power is stored in batteries in the well pit until it is needed. Stephenson has 2,600 amp hours of capacity. An amp hour is the amount of energy charge in a battery that will allow one ampere of current to flow for one hour.

He paid about $3,000 for the batteries. Some came from Sandia labs, which are required to replace backup batteries periodically, whether they've been used or not, and others from a company going out of business.

The well pit also contains a 25-year-old freezer, essentially an insulated box Stephenson built that runs off a compressor.

His solar system is so reliable that Stephenson only has to turn on the backup generator a few times a year, generally after a series of cloudy days. It provides more than enough electricity for the lights, computers, printers, microwave and appliances, including electric guitars when the boys were still living at home. A small, separate solar panel is used to run power tools in the shop.

The oldest panel has lost only 5 percent of its output since it was installed, Stephenson said. He has no plans to add to the capacity, especially now that the household consists of him, his wife and three dogs. "I think we're done. We have all the power we need," he said.

A wood-burning stove in the living room provides supplementary heat in the winter, and Stephenson cuts his own wood.

Two tankless water heaters — one in the bathroom and another in the mud room — produce instantaneous hot water. They run on propane, which Stephenson orders twice a year at an annual cost of about $600. The stove and oven also run on propane.

Stephenson and Wilson are lucky their well produces good water, although the flow — a gallon a minute — is low. They found water at 140 feet, but neighbors have had to go deeper or struck out. But that's enough for the house. They use rainwater to irrigate outdoor trees and the vegetable garden. Storage tanks positioned around the property have a combined capacity of about 6,000 gallons.

A cell phone and a Wild Blue satellite on the roof, which brings Internet service to the house, allow Wilson to work at home part of the time. She consults with Head Start programs all over the country through Community Development Institute, a government contractor. The only thing that taints the couple's low carbon footprint is her heavy travel schedule. "I contribute to the problem by flying everywhere," she said.

Stephenson and Wilson don't have to do without, but they make it a point to own only things they use regularly. For example, they make toast with a little stovetop device instead of a toaster. And they wash dishes by hand. But, he said, "We can have anything out here that you can use in town."

Lack of financial incentives and dishonest solar builders dimmed interest in solar power for a while, Stephenson acknowledged. But now it's time to take another look and for homeowners to consider becoming their own power company, he said. "I wish there were more incentives. When you get all this sunshine, why not put some panels on the roof? Maybe that will (eliminate) a coal-fired plant somewhere."

Contact Anne Constable at 986-3022 or aconstable@sfnewmexican.com.

BY THE NUMBERS

1,000: Wattage of 5 photovoltaic panels

2,600: Amp hours of storage batteries

$3,000: Cost of storage batteries

180: Number of acres owned by Stephenson and Wilson

$600: Family's annual energy cost