Dallas Home Improvement Show

We came, we saw, we paid.

Where -

Dallas Convention Center, Sunday 03/28/10.

How Much -

$10 to park, $10 per head. We brought dollar off ticket coupons that we swiped off of the internet and we were invited to complete a demographics questionnaire before we entered the show. Completing the form got you an additional buck off each ticket. It was worth the dollar off but we’ll see about the future spam we receive. They promised they would never, ever do this. Sure they won’t.

Shopping -

Our first impression was that the show was just too expensive for the number of vendors that were participating. Were the vendor products interesting and where they selling products you would actually buy? Yes.

The problem was that there just wasn’t enough of them. We walked the entire show at a snail’s pace and talked to vendors we weren’t really interested in talking to. Completing the loop took about 30 minutes. For two people that equates to 83 cents per minute. Damn that’s expensive.

If you went to shop for windows for your house and wanted to do a side-by-side comparison of multiple vendors, the ticket price was cheap. It would have been easy to do that and line up your vendor(s) of choice to come do a free estimate. So, the usefulness of the show is a matter of perspective.

The vendors were primarily for-hire contractors that will gladly replace your roof, all of your windows or install a gigantic spa in your yard for you.

We’re do-it-yourselfers, that means we buy stuff and install it ourselves, mostly. From that perspective we were challenged to find the good stuff we like to look at.

Interesting Products -

Metal backed shingles – They look just like petroleum based shingles only the back is actually an aluminum of some sort. We saw this as being a very good idea and thought the metal backing would make them tough as nails. We’ll see where this idea goes.

Spray-in foam insulation – It’s been around for a long time but manufacturer’s have tweaked formulas and installation techniques. We watched an installation video of the foam to the exterior walls of a house and were impressed with the coverage they achieved with minimal visual violations to the brick. Nice. It’s difficult to imagine so much benefit without actually tearing the house down and installing insulation. But then, what’s the point of doing that?

Water heaters – Benjamin Franklin has developed a water heater that looks like a big R2D2 robot. Computerized and programmable, very sexy, very lengthy warranty and very expensive. It’s actually a heat pump. Doing the math in our heads we determined that it would take quite awhile to get back our return on investment. However, depending on your motivation we would include it in our analysis of hot-water consumption and really crunch the numbers if we were building new or making a big change to an existing house.

They also offer a water heater that’s about the size of an old hard-sided suitcase. It mounts to a wall. We were drawn to it like the pull of gravity. Before you get too close know this: The unit is gas-only and can only service one appliance at a time. No showers with the dishwasher running or laundry while the showers are running. We could envision this product being more for a secondary structure on a property. Cheap to run, low usage, and has basic output requirements. It’s an interesting idea for the right application.

Conclusions -

We hope the show continues to attract vendors and people in the future. For a show that appears to be just getting off the ground we’d recommend that they go cheaper on the ticket prices and generate some buzz and then zing ‘em with higher priced ticketing later on.

Jeff – Dirty Shirt Contributor
www.dirtyshirt.info