Two in One

The annual NOWRA Installer Academy makes a good fit with the education and exhibits at the Pumper & Cleaner Environmental Expo in Louisville

If the crowds around the NOWRA Roe-D-Hoe competition were a good indicator, onsite installers were well represented at the 30th Annual Pumper & Cleaner Environmental Expo International Feb. 24-27 in Louisville.

NOWRA president Tom Groves was pleased with the fifth annual Installer Academy, which for the first time ran in tandem with the Expo. The Academy was held in Las Vegas in December for its first four years, but this time it moved to the two days just before the Expo opened.

The 60 onsite professionals who attended the Academy had a chance to see the full spectrum of the environmental service industry if they stuck around for the Expo — and some of them did, according to Groves.

“I was at the Roe-D-Hoe finals Saturday, and I saw some people there who had been to our training on Monday,” he says. (The Roe-D-Hoe, of course, is the annual backhoe skills competition, and it ran for three days on the Expo show floor — there’s a story about it in this issue.)

Lots to see

And speaking of the show floor, I am sure I saw more new onsite products at the Expo than in recent years. At some past shows it just wasn’t obvious that many things were new in the onsite world. This time on almost every aisle of the show hall I saw something I hadn’t seen before — treatment unit, tank, control panel, chamber, effluent filter, exacavator.

Perhaps some of that was because various NOWRA business sponsors attended the Academy and stayed on for the Expo. In any case, it was good to see innovation in full bloom in the onsite industry.

The Academy itself followed its traditional education pattern with three separate learning tracks. The Consortium of Institutes for Decen-tralized Wastewater Treatment held a basic installation training program that ran from start to finish on both days.

“On evaluation forms, some people said it was the best training they had ever been to,” says Groves. “They said they learned more in those two days than they had in other training events they attended.”

Plenty of variety

Another track covering both days consisted of vendor training rooms where NOWRA sponsors — Bio-Microbics Inc., Norweco Inc., Polylok Inc., Bord na Mona and Infiltrator Systems Inc., gave small-group presentations about their products.

“These presentations were very focused on people who actually use the technologies or are interested in representing them,” says Groves. “It’s not a hard sell. They talked about new things they were doing and answered any questions the people in attendance cared to ask.”

The other track started on Monday with a tour of the Zoeller Pump Company headquarters in Louisville and a series of business-development seminars given by Zoeller employees.

On Tuesday, the topic for that track was drip dispersal. “The two biggest drip dispersal companies, Geoflow and Netafim, combined and split the presentations,” says Groves. “They talked about drip dispersal in general, the advantages, the site and soil considerations, things to look at it in designing systems, installation techniques and operational issues. It was a great collaborative effort from two companies who are competitors but worked very closely together.”

Glad to be there

Groves saw benefits to both installers and his association in running the Academy next to the Expo. “The meeting rooms were provided to us by [Expo sponsor] COLE Inc. All we had to do was pay for the instructors, the food and beverage, some of the audio-visual,” he says. “Although our attendance was smaller, the event was more financially successful.

“We’d love to do it the same way again. I think we learned a couple of valuable lessons on how we can improve the Academy. We were very thankful for the opportunity to partner and piggyback on the front end of a well-established show like the Expo. I hope the Expo helped us draw more attention to our program, and I hope our Installer Academy brought a little more visibility to the Pumper Show as well.”



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