Flint Firm Grows With Solar Roofing
A Flint company is experiencing explosive growth selling solar electric roof kits.
Freedom Solar Roofing is an outgrowth of American Metal Roofs, a company formed in 1999 by Frank Farmer and two partners to capitalize on a growing trend toward steel and aluminum roofs for residential buildings.
Farmer, a native of the small Upper Peninsula town of Rock, started his entrepreneurial journey after deciding that a career in medicine wasn't for him. He left the Michigan State University School of Osteopathic Medicine in 1983 to establish a small apartment locator business in Lansing. From there he started selling replacement windows for a Grand Rapids-based company, where he stayed until 1999.
"Metal roofs have just exploded in popularity based on the diminishing oil content in shingles," Farmer said. "A consumer only has to replace a shingle roof once after 10 or 12 years, when he thought it was going to last 30, before he starts asking about his other options."
Several years later, energy conservation concerns led to the spinoff of Freedom Solar.
"We started looking as a company at where the whole country needed to go in terms of renewable energy and conservation with a product we sold called Heat Barrier XP, an insulation that you blow in on top of existing insulation and it turns a house into a thermos bottle, literally," Farmer said. "We came to realize that the best way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil was solar power."
After checking various technologies, Farmer and partners decided on the Uni-Solar thin film solar panel, made at five locations in Michgian by Auburn Hills-based United Solar.
And most importantly, they decided to make solar simple.
"Used to be it wasn't easy to get solar," Farmer said. "You'd bring a person in to do a site plan, another to engineer it and design it, and you'd have solar companies come in and make proposals."
Freedom Solar's idea instead is a simple solar kit.
Freedom designed six different sizes of solar panel systems -- in several widths and 10- or 19-foot lengths -- that are prewired and ready to install. Freedom pre-installs the solar panels on an 18-inch-wide metal pan that attaches easily to a roof.
"Our kit is ready to assemble at the job site, with all the electrical components that they will need for the installation," Farmer said. "We ship the kit out to the job site for a contractor."
The systems cost about $10,000 per kilowatt. Most home designs are built to generate between 2.5 and three kilowatts. "We design systems to generate a third to a half of what a home is going to use, to get rid of the most expensive tiers of electricity for people," Farmer said.
Also, more than half of the cost of a system can be covered by DTE Energy's Solar Currents program and a 30 percent federal tax credit.
Farmer said Freedom Solar is selling a lot of the units and will soon be selling a lot more.
"We set our sights too low," Farmer said. "We estimated first year sales of $750,000, and we exceeded that in our first six months."
More sales loom through an alliance with Ohio's Classic Metal Roofing Systems, a major metal roof distributor with more than 100 dealers, which has picked up the Freedom Solar product line.
"We believe we will see exponential growth once people really discover what we've got here and how turnkey we've made these systems," Farmer siad. "We've taken the mystery out of solar is what we've done."
More at www.freedomsolarroofing.com.
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