Recently, some of us traveled to the Central Valley Facility Expo in Modesto, California. As they say on their website, the Central Valley Facility Expo “attracts a diverse audience of facilities managers, maintenance managers, and energy managers  from a wide variety of industries including food processing, government, healthcare, manufacturing, education, wineries, utilities and others.” We had boatloads of fun chatting with everyone at the Expo and here are some highlights! By the way, we love visiting the facility expo, and we’ve written about it before here: the 2021 Northern California Facilities Expo (that’s the one in Santa Clara!).

The drive up and back

We choose to live in California for a reason. Or maybe for 100 or 1000 reasons! It’s a beautiful place to live, and spring could be the best time to visit! Driving over we saw green fields, which might not be green for much longer since we’re in a drought. We haven’t had much rain, so everything is already starting to turn golden. And the hills stay golden until the rainy season starts back up in the late fall.

Educational seminars

From renewable energy to creating a safe environment to LED lighting, there were seminars for everyone! We didn’t have a lot of time to attend the seminars, but we got a kick out of talking to people as they went to the seminars. Of particular interest were the seminars on emergency planning and lighting. Here’s a full list of educational talks. (Did you know that generators are vulnerable to failure because of infrequent operation?)

Meeting people

Sometimes when people stop by, they just have a quick question, so we’re super polite and friendly to everyone. At the beginning of the first day, people really wanted to talk about heat reduction window film, since Modesto gets scorching hot in the summertime. We really enjoyed meeting the facilities coordinator, Lisa Nagle. That’s her, above.

Hobnobbing at Happy Hour

We know you’re thinking that maybe hobnobbing is the same as meeting people, but hobnobbing is a little more! For one thing, there could be beer or wine involved. Speaking of which, we co-sponsored the Happy Hour with our friend Kashmir Uppal, of Atlas Copco, a manufacturer of huge air compressors. We tried to get the facilities people to put the happy hour bar into our booth, but no luck! Oh, well. There’s always next year! Some of the exhibitors have had booths at other facilities expos before, and we’re always happy to see them again! For instance, the guys at Sunbelt Rentals really seem to get around! They’re a friendly crew!

The swag

There was all the usual swag, such as pens, Post-it notes, hats and tons of candy (why is there always candy?). But we’re talking about the Advanced Swag(tm). You know what we’re talking about! The swag you keep forever, like the banana tension grip thingie we had to trade to get.