AURELIUS — About 1,600 people were drawn to the first Upper Finger Lakes Home & Lifestyle Show hosted at the Fingerlakes Mall Saturday and Sunday.
Ninety different vendors gave home improvement advice, sold artisan goods, crafts, food and drink as part of the show, while other special events like face-painting and breakfast with the Easter Bunny took place for kids.
“This is our first event for the Finger Lakes,” said Eric Roberts, president of Media Resources Marketing Inc., which put on the show. Roberts said this new location was an experiment to try a middle ground between Syracuse and Rochester, where most large home and lifestyle shows are held.
Roberts said one of the big draws to the event was the chance to participate in a vintage RV giveaway. Each guest who came was guaranteed one chance to guess the five-number combination of a safe that held the RV’s keys. If you were able to open the safe, you won the RV. As of 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, the RV’s keys were still locked inside the safe. Extra entries could be earned by mingling with other vendors.
One vendor in particular became a conversation piece among other vendors.
David Chalker’s booth was decked with cookies, a cake and a pizza – that he made in the event space using his solar electric ovens.
Chalker, of Waterloo, is the founder and president of Sun BD Corporation and he said he is the only one in the world, known to him, making hybrid solar ovens. He is still waiting to have competition.
His “amazing journey” began about 30 years ago when he sent $3 in an envelop to a P.O. box. Flipping through one of his wife’s home magazines he came across, and responded to, an advertisement that said for $3 the magazine would send back instructions to create a solar oven.
Although his wife and kids thought he was crazy, Chalker said, when the directions arrived he made a solar oven and cooked a chicken in his yard – and it worked. This began a family tradition of solar cooking on the weekends that spanned many years.
After tinkering and making different models, Chalker was inspired to try to create a hybrid solar oven with an electric back-up in 2004. He could only find one on the internet, and it was made in India.
He ordered two ovens from India, with only one making it through customs intact, and after using the hybrid solar he never went back.
About four years later, Chalker went to India to meet the inventor and learn more. While the ovens were “very well engineered,” Chalker said, they were “poor in quality.”
Chalker decided to develop his own. Now, since the inventor in India has passed away, Chalker is the only hybrid solar oven maker.
Chalker’s first model was called the “Sun Focus” and now his second model – made from cardboard and selling for about $200 less – is called “The Ugly Hybrid.”
Chalker said he’s sold a couple hundred of his own ovens, custom making each one as orders come in. Just in case, the ovens “are made to be mass produced as well.” It takes Chalker about five hours to build one oven, but he said it would take six hours to build 10 ovens because of the way he’s designed them to be built.
Although Chalker didn’t sell any hybrid ovens this weekend, and has actually only sold a handful of his ovens in New York altogether, his ovens are in numerous states and have users stretching as far as Sweden, the Philippines and Japan.
The Home & Lifestyle show wasn’t slow just for Chalker.
“A lot of vendors lost money, I think,” said MaryEllen Weiskotten who had a booth selling wines from Thousand Islands Winery in Alexandria Bay. Renting a booth for the weekend cost $250 – $300, and for those like Weiskotten who had to pay for a couple nights in a hotel they may not have come out in the black from the event.
Weiskotten said the indoor garage sale, vendors in the mall outside the main event space, which had the intent of drawing people into the show may have had the opposite effect as people may have not wanted to pay to enter the event when they could stroll the garage sale for free.
The event staff noticed, however, and adapted to continue to draw people into the show. On Saturday, during the early afternoon, staff eliminated the $5 cover charge and went through the mall with handouts inviting people to come for free.
“We did expect more (people),” Roberts said, adding that it was a bit slow but that wasn’t rare for a new event at a new venue.
“You’re always adapting,” Roberts said. “When it’s your first one, especially, you’ve got to learn your dynamics.”
Roberts said they will have to evaluate the event as a whole to decide if it will become an annual event at this location, but he did say a positive thing was that those who showed up were “serious people” and had projects in mind when they walked through the doors.
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