Electrification Stories: “This is what I can do.”

In 2025, CUB sat down with Sarah Scherschligt to hear about her experience making energy improvements to her recently purchased home. We hope sharing stories like Sarah’s can help others think ahead to improvements they can make to their own homes, whether their priority is to cut their energy costs or to reduce their home’s impact on the environment.

Sarah is the Executive Pastor at Westwood Lutheran Church in St. Louis Park. She and her husband moved to Minnesota in 2023.

For Sarah, cutting their home’s carbon emissions was always a priority.  As she put it, “I've always had an environmental passion. As I was coming up, it was the ozone layer and the rainforest.”

She has been on a multi-year effort to make greenhouse gas reductions where she can. “I've had to be on a little bit of a journey of accepting that I am not as ethically pristine as I would like to be around environmentalism,” she shared with us. But with Sarah’s solar and energy efficiency projects, she knows she’s doing her part. “I've just had to say: ‘This is what I can do.’”

Sarah had one key piece of advice for other people considering similar home improvements: “Do it right now. Don't waste too much time thinking about it. Just start. Don’t get too out of joint about your role. But you do have a role. So do it. And then don't be like, ‘oh, but I didn't recycle everything today.’ Be realistic and don't be ashamed about what you need to live.”

First Steps: From energy audit to solar array

When house hunting, Sarah and her husband prioritized a house with character and comfort that was suitable for solar installation and other electric upgrades. They landed on a house built in 1936 with little tree cover and no central air conditioning. “It's got some character, and it's got a lot that needs fixing. It's an old house, so it has boilers and a mini-split heat pump. So right off the bat, we decided, ‘Okay, this is a good house.’”

“The first thing we did was get the Center for Energy and Environment (CEE) to come in and do an audit… We knew we wanted to get our house to be as energy efficient as possible, and we didn't know this house.” CEE is an operator of the Home Energy Squad which provides home energy audits to assess the efficiency of a home and can serve as a starting point for upgrades. They also helped Sarah implement little changes right away – installing a programmable thermostat, switching light bulbs to LEDs, and putting in low-flow shower heads for water conservation.

Those were the first small steps. Then, Sarah decided to tackle one of the biggest projects for home energy savings: installing a solar array. She knew that their house was a prime candidate for solar, and next up was figuring out costs. According to the Center for Sustainable Energy, the typical solar array will cost on average around $23,000. That’s a lot!

Sarah began searching around for loan options and landed on CEE’s Residential Solar Loan. She also took advantage of a solar rebate from the City of Hopkins as well as the federal tax credit for solar installation (which has since expired). These supports made the project possible. “I think we would probably not have done solar if we hadn't had a rebate,” she said. “It just put it out of reach without it.” Sarah’s contractor handled the entire permitting process, and she didn’t have any issues.

After accounting for those discounts, Sarah says, “the monthly cost of the loan is cheaper than the average monthly cost of electricity.” Her solar panels started generating electricity in June 2024 – and she didn’t pay for electricity again until January 2025. “I felt like there was this perception that we heard when we put them on, ‘Oh, you must be like rolling in it, you can install solar panels.’ We actually just took out a loan and now we're not paying for electricity for two-thirds of the year.”

Beyond the cost savings, Sarah loves the look of her solar panels, too. “I actually think solar panels are pretty. I love the elegance of it: this is my roof, and that's the sun, and they're working together.”

On to home comfort and efficiency

Sarah’s home relies on mini-split heat pumps for heating and cooling. Mini-splits are installed in select rooms of the house. They can be installed with no ductwork, and allow you to control the temperature of specific spaces. “Part of what I love about it is that I can turn the mini-split in just our bedroom. I'm just cooling the area I need cool.” Sarah’s mini-splits provide some heat, too, but they switch over to their gas boiler when it gets to about 40 degrees outside.

Key to staying comfortable and saving energy is ensuring that your home is well-insulated. Through their earlier home energy audit, Sarah says: “We learned that we had basically no insulation in our roof. Our walls were really good, but our roof was nothing.” This is a common hurdle for older homes. Much of Minnesota’s housing stock built prior to 1978 has poor insulation, which results in energy waste and higher home heating and cooling bills.

Again, Sarah relied on rebates and incentives to make her insulation project more affordable. She was able to get up to $1,300 from the City of Hopkins, and an extra $1,300 in rebates from their gas utility, CenterPoint. “We re-insulated our house with quality insulation for $300,” she said. Now, the home requires far less heat and air conditioning to stay comfortable. Because of these projects, Sarah is able to keep comfortable while reducing her home’s carbon footprint by using less energy.

Making changes outside the home

Environmental sustainability is a core value for Sarah’s church, and they’re pursuing some big projects to make that goal a reality. They can’t afford the upfront cost to convert to geothermal, but they have a plan to replace their old HVAC system with a more efficient system, including condensing boilers, air source heat pumps, and digital controls. The first phase will go in this fall.

Outside of energy upgrades, the church is introducing things like recycling and composting for their weekly community meal. The meal usually serves upwards of 250 community members. “It’s teaching people new patterns and new habits. If people do it right, the actual amount of trash for a meal is probably a gallon. People are buying compostable products now. It’s cool to see the change in the way the church operates.”

A small group of church members are forming a team to support community members by providing a helping hand for small tasks like buying and switching out old inefficient light bulbs. “We're thinking especially about some of our senior members. We want to start to build those person-to-person partnerships to help make these small changes. There's a lot happening through the church.”

What’s next for Sarah

In her role as pastor, Sarah is often asked what inspires her and motivates her around environmentalism. “The relationship that we have with creation seems so broken. It's just a general sense that something is really wrong,” she said. What drives her? “I have kids in elementary school, and I’m motivated to make sure they have a habitable planet.”

The home energy projects Sarah implemented happened over the course of two years, and involved plenty of research and consideration – and the effort continues. Next, Sarah’s on the lookout for a cheap induction stove on Craigslist, with support from another City of Hopkins rebate. “Ideally,” she says, “we'd like to be off gas completely.”

For now, this vision remains a ways off. But Sarah is taking the journey one step at a time. To close our conversation, she left us with this anecdote:

“When we had kids, we had this approach to cloth diapers that I feel exemplifies our approach to environmentalism in general: We used them when we could. When we couldn't, because it was going to break us, we just whipped out the disposables and used them instead. That's what made it possible for us to do it. Whatever makes it possible for you to move the needle on environmentalism, just start.”