Michigan Refinancing | MI Refinance

Carpeting can be problematic, especially in Michigan where the weather can change like the minute hand on an analog wall clock. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner or a home owner — keeping your carpets clean can be a real challenge. While vacuuming may help aesthetically, unless you have a professional-grade, or high-dollar, vacuum cleaner, your vacuuming probably does little more to actually clean your carpets than sweeping it with a broom would do. Visual cleanliness aside, however, carpeting is no more “clean” because it looks good than a wiped-off plate that held raw chicken is “clean” because you don’t see any residue from the bacteria-ridden juice. So, maintaining a clean carpet is about more than just how it looks, and that’s why you really do need professional carpet cleaning services.

Unless you’re super-strict about who walks on your floors and how they do it — sans shoes with clean socks only — for instance, your carpeting will attract a whole host of elements that range from unappealing to outright infectious. However, vacuuming with a conventional vacuum, even if it’s backed up with the occasional steam cleaning or carpet shampoo, simply will not help you to clean your carpets sufficiently. Regardless of how you feel about door-to-door vacuum salespeople or the wares that they push, their demonstrations showcase a valid problem with department-store vacuum cleaners — they push more surface dirt around than they actually pick up, and they certainly do not remove the deeply-embedded elements.

Professional carpet cleaners, on the other hand, have the tools necessary to help you remove the dirt, grit, and allergens from your carpeting. While you can shampoo your carpeting, or steam clean it with a grocery-store steamer rental, if you aren’t cleaning your carpets completely to begin with, all you’re doing is adding water to the dirt, grit, and allergens that reside in your mat or at the bottom of your carpet where conventional vacuums simply cannot reach. As if creating ‘mud’ in your carpeting isn’t bad enough, the grit that stays in your carpeting can shorten the life of your carpeting substantially, especially in high-traffic areas.

While you may not need professional carpet cleaning services every week, it’s not a bad idea to bring some professional cleaners into your home or office every few months to clean your carpeting thoroughly. Not only will a good carpet cleaning extend the life of your carpeting, it will make it cleaner, and thus safer, for you and those who frequent your carpeted floors.

In Charleston Township, Michigan, not far from Kalamazoo, Sam and Connor Field and their business partner, Richard Schmitt, formed a company, Kalamazoo Solar, to install a ground-mounted solar array comprised of 756 solar panels delivering 150 kilowatts of electricity that are expected to become the largest solar ranches in the state.

The size is notable, but not spectacular, in national terms. In purely local terms, it will be a giant. The University of Michigan has 30 kilowatts; Oakland University has 10; Aquinas College has 10; the City of Ann Arbor has a solar fountain; the Urban Options demo house has 2; Cityside Middle School in Zeeland has 1; Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park has 11; Pictured Rocks Lakeshore has 2. A number of installations are residential. The state has a total of 734 kilowatts installed.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Kalamazoo’s solar field array is the fact that the partners cut, drilled and welded 38,000 pounds of steel and 12,000 pounds of rerod themselves to build the 126 racks needed in order to save money.

Completion is scheduled for December 1, and for the Fields it is the culmination of a dream, and a belief that the most important issue facing America is energy independence combined with reducing the greenhouse gases emitted by conventional energy generation.

Connor, the younger Field, is an economics major at the University of Michigan. Sam is a lawyer. Schmitt owns the land on which the solar array is being assembled, and if it were not for the feed-in tariff (FiT) offered by regional utility Consumers Energy, the concept might not have gotten off the ground, figuratively speaking.

The Michigan FiT, modeled on German legislation, is still in the experimental phase, with Consumers and DTE, another Michigan utility, largely hopeful the initiative will, if passed, provide more renewable energy to meet the state’s 10-percent by 2015 renewable portfolio standard, or RPS. The initiative is being pushed by Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, a number of state legislators, and ReEnergize Michigan, a new coalition of citizen groups, unions, churches, and environmental organizations. Opposition for FiTs is coming from the Michigan Electric Cooperative Association, a trade association representing Michigan electric co-ops that wants to build a 600-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Rogers.

The Kalamazoo solar field received approval in August from the Charleston Township board of trustees, and will, when completed, be connected to Consumer’s Energy grid. Then, the company officers plan to invite Granholm to the commissioning ceremony.

Three guys and a bunch of tools to create the largest solar energy installation in Michigan seems like a modern Cinderella story, but one likely to be repeated across the nation as more and more people realize the benefits of clean, renewable solar energy.