David and Lisa Frame, husband and wife, founded and own Great Lakes Applied Power and Chelsea Plank® Flooring, both divisions of Frame Industries, Inc. Growing up on a small farm, David was the president of Chelsea High School’s chapter of the Future Farmers of America. After graduating from Ferris State University with his bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics, David worked as a computer programmer for Malloy Lithographing in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

As the story goes, in the spring of 1989 David began a part-time venture on evenings and weekends with his close friend Don Sullivan. Interested in logging, David had some experience on his family farm while in high school and was unafraid of learning more about the lumber industry. With $600 in cash, David and his partner started a logging business called Frame & Sullivan Hardwoods.

In 1994, David made the jump and quit his job at Malloy to work full time at home in his quickly growing business. David and Lisa bought out their partner and incorporated Frame Hardwoods on their own. At this point David was receiving noise complaints from his countryside neighbors, so in January 1994 they rented 5000 SF of a building in an industrial park in Ann Arbor. In the next 2 years they expanded to 15,000 SF in the same park, including a (slightly drafty) office. Lisa was now working full time for their business and brought on her former co-worker Julie Schneider to help in the office. In these days, you could often find David and Lisa’s two children Megan and Max “helping” by licking stamps for mailers. By 1996, with the custom home building industry in Ann Arbor going strong, David was running a full-scale custom molding business, and also started milling custom plank flooring orders, in addition to distributing unfinished strip flooring coming from the large strip flooring mills.

In 1996 David recognized the need in the building industry for high quality, precision-crafted, quality-controlled plank flooring. So he purchased several acres on West Industrial Drive in Chelsea and by June of 1997 he was manufacturing plank flooring in his new 21,000 square foot facility. Chelsea Plank® Flooring was born! Within one year they added another 20,000 square feet onto their original building. Working past sun-down most days, David has been known to take a nap on a pack of lumber for a quick pick-me-up!

To increase their yields and manufacturing capacity, David built another 30,000 SF manufacturing building in 2003 and by 2010 they added another 21,000 SF building for lumber storage with space for a small machinery fabricating shop. David has always been heavily involved in machinery maintenance and improvements. In 1999 he designed, built, and patented the machinery for distressing plank flooring. In 2015-2016, with their new fabricating shop, David and his maintenance team engineered and built a set of computer-assisted machinery to do the automated material handling for the flooring operation. David’s son Max is a mechanical engineer and has helped out on several upgrade designs.

Lisa always says that David’s motto is “Don’t stop until it’s done”, even if it means coming home so late that your dinner gets fed to the barn cats once or twice. Through the hard work of David and Lisa, their children, and their dedicated employees, Frame Hardwoods has come to be known by flooring distributors and dealers as producing the highest quality pre-finished plank flooring available. Megan has always had a strong interest in both mathematics and the family business. Even while teaching mathematics at two local colleges by the age of 23, Megan never stopped working part-time in the office at Frame Hardwoods. Since 2014 Megan has been working full-time at Frame Hardwoods, stepping up to manage the business as David and Lisa begin what David calls “semi-retired” life.

Always busy with a project, David began his “semi-retirement” by thoroughly educating himself on solar power to solve a problem presented to him at a property in rural Northern Michigan. To provide power to a large group of storage buildings at this property, it was very unaffordable to have the electric company connect line-power to this property. Forever the problem-solver, David engineered, fabricated, and installed independent solar-powered battery bank systems in over a dozen buildings. This was the beginning of our Off-Grid Power Cells! Consulting with his mentor, a retired industrial master electrician, and several electrical engineers and residential master electricians, David expanded on his Off-Grid Power Cell design to improve the existing backup power at his home; this was the inspiration for our Hybrid Power Cell.

After installing many of these systems in homes & barns for family, friends, and neighbors, David and Megan realized the need for pre-engineered and pre-wired 3rd generation power systems. Expanding the scope of their existing business was the next logical leap. Changing the name of the company to Frame Industries in 2022, the home of Chelsea Plank® Flooring also became the home of Great Lakes Applied Power. There are many options out there for consumers interested in improving the hybrid and backup power for their homes or businesses, and providing power to off-grid structures. The difficult part is putting it all together! Great Lakes Applied Power is dedicated to bridging that gap on the foundations of their family-run business.

FIRST GENERATION -- EMERGENCY HOME POWER BACKUP

This is the 5000 Watt pull start gas generator with a 1-gallon tank, you had to drag outside when the grid power went out for any significant amount of time. You had to run a cable thru the basement window from the generator and connect to the 2-pole electric dryer circuit and back feed the power into the main panel with the main breaker shut off. Then to find out if the grid power was back on, you watched for your neighbors’ lights, i.e. the ones that did not have a generator running, or when your gallon of gas ran out you could turn the main breaker on to check for grid power!

SECOND GENERATION POWER BACKUP

This is the dedicated gas generator phase, installed just outside your home that turns on automatically when the grid power goes out, and runs continuously at 3600 RPM to generate 60hz AC power, 240v split phase, and feeds it into your main panel, or sub-panel for priority circuits. The generator is connected to either natural gas or propane.

The problem with these systems is that the gas generator must run at full RPM no matter how much power is being used in the home.

Even if there are only 2 lights on, it's still running at full capacity using anywhere between 1 gallon to 2 gallons of propane per hour of runtime, or the equivalent amount of natural gas. The fuel usage depends on the size of the generator, a 10KW generator uses 1 gallon per hour, a 20KW whole house generator uses 2 gallons per hour. With propane at $2.20 per gallon, this would cost the homeowner between $50 to $100 per day of grid power outage, not to mention some wear and tear on the generator, and noise generated 24 hours per day.

THIRD GENERATION POWER BACKUP SYSTEMS

These systems use a battery bank to store power with an inverter/charger to maintain the battery bank. It will automatically switch to battery power in 10 milliseconds when the grid power fails to keep your priority circuits powered up and use no more energy than needed from the battery bank to power these selected circuits. If the grid power is out for an extended amount of time, say more than 12 hours, and the battery bank needs to be re-charged, it will automatically turn on a gas generator to re-charge the battery bank then shut off the generator, using only the amount of gas needed to keep the battery bank charged up. It will automatically switch the load back to grid power when it returns with very minimal power disruption both ways.

In the 3rd generation system, you may use 4 gallons of gas for a one day power outage to re-charge the battery bank (for 4 hours total). This represents up to an 83% reduction in fossil-fuel usage for the purpose of home power backup! To expand on this huge increase in fuel efficiency, hybrid power systems can also incorporate solar power to further decrease fossil-fuel usage and increase the energy independence for the customer. Great Lakes Applied Power has pre-engineered these 3rd Generation solutions for easy installation in your home, cabin, farm, or commercial facility!