When Alden Hathaway told his wife that he was ready to build their dream home, she thought it was the end of life as she knew it: Her husband's vision -- a totally self-sufficient, solar-powered home for their family of five -- would do away with some energy-hungry appliances. The clothes dryer and dishwasher might have to go, along with her morning ritual of blow-drying and curling her hair.

"I won't be hanging my clothes on a line, honey, and I certainly won't be parting with my heat rollers," Carol Hathaway recalls telling him.

Alden, a University of Virginia-trained electrical engineer, had always been a bit extreme when it came to electricity. For their first date, he took Carol on a romantic countryside drive to check out high-voltage transmission lines. Now, she feared, her husband was going overboard.

It was 1998, a time when most solar houses were offbeat in their design and built in uncharted territory -- beyond the civilized world of wires and electric utilities.

"I wasn't about to go to the woods and do something weird," said Carol. "I am conservative by nature -- politically, theologically and in every other way. I am not some hippie weirdo."

But Alden's idealism and Carol's pragmatism turned out to be perfect complements. In the summer of 2001, the couple built a house to satisfy them both: fully solar-powered, located in a choice neighborhood and replete with plug-in creature comforts -- including all the gadgetry coveted by their digital-era kids, Tripp, 14; Mary, 12; and Megan, 10.

The Hathaways teamed up with Don Bradley, a builder and developer whose company, Solar Strategies, is based in Philadelphia, to design a colonial-style house with inconspicuous roof-top solar panels and a full suite of energy-efficient appliances. The result, on a 4.8-acre site in Northern Virginia near Purcellville, is a house so commodious, cutting-edge and cost-effective that it's at the vanguard of a much larger movement: the growth of solar suburbia.

Even before the Hathaway house was built, the American Solar Energy Society asked Bradley to showcase it on the national Mall during Earth Day 2001 as a prototype house of the future. Dubbed the Solar Patriot, it was toured by more than 25,000 visitors over three weeks, then loaded onto a flatbed (the modular structure was built to travel) and trucked to its permanent destination.

The family moved in last August and, with the Department of Energy monitoring daily electricity use, has completed a successful test run in one of America's first "zero energy" homes.

The zero-energy concept refers to a home that produces its own power, usually from solar panels, but is connected to the electricity grid used by traditional houses. It can draw power from the utility whenever necessary -- when the sun isn't shining -- and pump its own "green" electricity back into the grid when it produces a surplus.

It's a zero-sum game: Nights balance out against days, sunny summer months balance out against dark ones in winter. Over a full year, a zero-energy house typically produces at least as much electricity as it consumes.

The DOE is now helping coordinate zero-energy building projects in more than a dozen cities, including San Francisco, Las Vegas, Orlando, Austin and Tucson. Next week, the department is sponsoring the Solar Decathlon here, a two-week event in which 14 prototype solar houses will be built on the Mall by architectural design teams from universities nationwide. (The exhibit will be open to the public from Sept. 26 to Oct. 6. For more information, see solardecathlon.com.)

Richard King, the director of the Solar Decathlon at the DOE, said the event will demonstrate "that today we can build comfortable, great-looking solar homes that meet the requirements of our modern lifestyles."

The Solar Decathlon also has corporate sponsors, including Home Depot, which last fall became the nation's first major distributor of off-the-shelf solar panels and a key participant in the effort to bring solar products to mainstream America.

Such an effort is certainly timely, given today's political and environmental concerns. "If just 10 percent of American families were to do what our family has done, we could wipe out our dependence on Iraqi oil and surpass the original Kyoto goals for reducing greenhouse emis- sions," said Alden Hathaway, 43, sitting down to dinner beneath a chandelier custom-fitted with super-efficient light bulbs, a technology he advocated when he worked as an engineer at Sylvania. "We're offering a simple, grass- roots solution to the biggest challenges of our time."

The Hathaways have calculated a 40 percent reduction in their average annual carbon dioxide emissions, factoring in both their clean-energy system and the purchase of a Toyota Prius, a $ 20,000 family-size car with a hybrid gas-electric engine that gets 52 miles per gallon in the city and 45 on the highway.

"We can raise our flags and put our hands over our hearts," says Carol, 43, serving up a chicken casserole from her energy-efficient convection oven, "but the best way we Americans can fight Saddam Hussein and the Middle Eastern leaders supporting terrorism is to eliminate our need for their major export." She turns to Tripp. "Which is oil," he chimes.

Because Carol, who works with a real-estate title company, and the three younger Hathaways aren't exactly abstemious about their electricity use -- the house has four computers, three TVs, two Nintendo systems, three stereos and a full complement of domestic appliances -- Alden built a hefty six-kilowatt solar generation system that spans 1,000 square feet on the rooftops of the house and garage.

"Most people assume a solar house is a spaceship-looking thing with boxy modules and antennas sticking out of it, or a junky eco-shack in the woods," said Alden, as he lounges in a mustard velvet armchair stroking his Corgi, Piper, nicknamed Solar Dog, who wears a collar embroidered with smiling suns. "We wanted the design of our home to prove that solar can be attractive to the masses."

They sure picked the right setting. Loudoun County -- a patchwork of rolling green pastures, antebellum farmhouses, vegetable gardens and duck ponds -- is the archetype of old-world American charm. It also has neighborhood homeowner associations with rigorous building codes that restrict the external decor of every new house. One association in the county rejected the Hathaways' proposal as soon as it heard the word "solar," doubtful that the Hathaways could build something in keeping with the neighborhood aesthetic.

They found a nearby property with fewer restrictions, and, with careful design decisions, were able to make the technology practically invisible. Bradley camouflaged the solar panels with a new "thin film" photovoltaic technology from a company called UniSolar. The flexible material can be cut, peeled and seamlessly pasted onto a generic tin roof. For maximum solar production, Bradley positioned the house facing due south, angling the roof to capture the arc of the sun's movement, and created a breezeway between the house and the garage so that there would be no overlap to create shadow.

Bradley also minimized the house's energy consumption. He and the Hathaways started with a prefabricated model -- inherently better-insulated than a stick-built house -- then customized it with highly insulated walls, windows and ductwork.

Energy-efficiency choices include compact fluorescent bulbs on motion-sensing timers, an EnergyStar Whirlpool refrigerator and front-loading Whirlpool Duet clothes washer and dryer and a Jenn-Air convection oven.

The house's energy system combines renewable technologies -- not just photo- voltaic panels to produce electricity but solar thermal panels to heat the water and a geothermal system for heating and air conditioning. (The latter is a labyrinth of pipes sunk five feet underground, where the earth is a constant temperature of 58 degrees; a heat-transfer fluid pumped through the pipe system heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer.)

Next to car and mortgage payments, energy bills are one of the largest household expenses for most American families. The average annual energy bill for a detached house is $ 1,570, according to the DOE.

The Hathaways' house, by contrast, has an annual energy bill of $ 132, or $ 11 a month, for the connect fee.

Of course, the energy-saving technology doesn't come free. But the Hathaways developed a long-term financing plan to manage the added costs. In total, the energy technology cost an additional $ 45,000 (the house and the land cost $ 385,000), but the family's financing plan increased the monthly mortgage payments by only 10 percent. So far, their savings in energy bills -- about $ 260 a month -- have offset the extra payments.

Alden, currently director of the Green Power Program at the Washington-based Environ- mental Resources Trust, also calculates that his Prius saves him more than $ 2,900 a year in gasoline costs. Yet, like his solar home, the savings come without concessions in performance or standard of living.

Bearing a striking resemblance to Dick Van Dyke in his button-down cardigan, Alden says their lifestyle is "about as normal as they come" but admits his home is something of a live-in laboratory. He and son Tripp have been monitoring and experimenting with the family's electricity use for years.

In sixth grade, Tripp calculated the energy use of every appliance in the house, from the water boiler to his clock radio. "I'd get a base line on how much energy we used on an average day," said Tripp. "Then if Mom was getting ready to cook grilled cheese sandwiches, I'd check the meter voltage to see how much juice the stove used."

Alden and the children also spent several summers in Africa installing solar systems on homes, schools and community centers through the nonprofit Solar Lights program they helped to develop through several churches.

Though the family's keen energy awareness isn't exactly typical, their shift toward energy-independence does reflect a nationwide trend. The demand for solar panels in America has been increasing at more than 20 percent per year for the past four years, according to the DOE. During that period, the cost of solar technology has plunged nearly 50 percent thanks to manufacturing innovations, making more mainstream applications possible.

In August, Home Depot announced that its test-marketing of AstroPower solar products in three California stores was so successful that it would expand its distribution to 61 stores in California, Delaware, New York and New Jersey, a move that a company spokesman called "a whopping expansion, even for us."

Shea Homes, one of the nation's largest home construction companies, has introduced a solar model that is now on back-order in California. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers has made solar installation and maintenance training available to all 750,000 members.

Next spring, developer John Clark, based in Tysons Corner, working with contractor Don Bradley, plans to begin construction in Haymount, Va., a new town in Caroline County 11 miles southeast of Fred- ericksburg. It will be designed by Duany-Plater- Zyberk, the same firm behind Kentlands in Maryland and Seaside in Florida. The Hathaways' house is to serve as the model for a neighborhood of 4,000 solar-powered houses, and the entire town of Haymount is to function as a profitable, emissions-free power plant.

According to David Garman, assistant secretary of the DOE, 18 million new houses will be built in this country between now and 2010.

The DOE is researching ways to reduce energy use in those new homes by 50 percent; it plans to encourage consumers with incentives for new energy-efficient homes and appliances, as well as photovoltaic systems and solar water heaters. Both President Bush's energy plan and the energy bills being deliberated in Congress include tax credits for solar homes.

"Alden Hathaway is a pioneer," said Garman. "We will use the data we are gathering from the Solar Patriot [house] to help make this goal possible."

Federal funding would spur the growth of solar suburbia, but consumer demand is already spiking on its own. Bradley has been commissioned by more than 30 clients in the Northeast to build Solar Patriot-style homes in the next year.

"As the nation cries out for energy independence," said Bradley, "going solar is really becoming the ultimate patriotic act."

Amanda Griscom is an energy analyst in New York City at the environmental consulting firm GreenOrder and an energy columnist for the environmental online magazine Grist (www.gristmagazine.com).

The Hathaway house will be among 24 places open on Oct. 5 as part of the 12th Annual National Tour of Solar Buildings and Homes. For more information and a tour brochure ($ 10, age discounts), call 202-564-1088 or see www.prsea.org.

For questions about energy-efficient and renewable energy technologies, visit the Ask an Energy Expert site at the DOE: www.eren.doe.gov/askanexpert or phone 800-363-3732.