Your machine runs on 400 volts at 50 hertz. The hall gives you something else. That gap is a rental line item, an advance deadline, and a conversation you want to have in month six rather than move-in week.
Electrical is the order everybody remembers, because a dark booth is obvious. What gets missed is that ordering power and getting your machine to run on it are two different problems, and only the first one is on the form.
What is different about US show power
US mains supply and European mains supply differ in both voltage and frequency. Most industrial equipment built for a European market expects a supply the American grid does not provide as standard, and the practical answer at a trade show is almost always a transformer, rented as a show services line.
Frequency is the part that catches people out. A transformer changes voltage. It does not change frequency. Equipment whose motor speed or timing is derived from supply frequency will behave differently at sixty hertz than at fifty, and whether that matters depends entirely on the machine. Your equipment manufacturer knows the answer. The show contractor does not.
What the contractor needs from you
The electrical order is not one number. It is a small specification, and getting it wrong is a floor-rate correction.
- ✓Voltage and phaseSingle phase or three phase, and at what voltage. Read it off the nameplate, do not estimate from a spec sheet for a different variant of the same model.
- ✓AmperageOrdered against actual draw, not the number that felt safe. Under-ordering means an upgrade at floor pricing. Over-ordering means paying for capacity you never used.
- ✓FrequencyFifty or sixty hertz, and whether your equipment tolerates the difference.
- ✓Drop locationMarked on your floor plan. This is the field people leave blank, and blank means the contractor picks.
- ✓Twenty four hour powerA separate and more expensive service. Anything that must not lose power overnight needs it named on the form.
- ✓Connection laborIn most halls only the official electrical contractor may make the final connection. That is a separate order from the power itself.
The drop location is a design decision
Power enters your booth at a point you specify on a floor plan, and it arrives from under the floor or from overhead depending on the hall and the booth type. Specify it late or vaguely and you get a cable running across the aisle you spent two months designing to be clear, or a floor box under the exact spot where the machine needs to sit.
On a machinery booth this compounds, because power is not the only service coming in. Compressed air, water in, and drainage out all arrive at specified points too, and they have to arrive somewhere the machine can reach without a hose crossing a walkway.
That coordination is design work. It happens on the same drawing as the graphics, and it happens first.
Order it, then order the labor to connect it
Two separate things. The service order buys the power. In most venues the official electrical contractor makes the final connection, and that labor is ordered on its own form with its own rate and its own schedule.
Booking the connection for a time that assumes the booth is finished, when the booth cannot be finished until the machine is connected and tested, is the classic sequencing error. Test the machine before the structure closes around it.
Air, water, and drainage are separate orders
Electrical is one form. If your machine needs compressed air, that is another form, with its own advance deadline and its own connection labor. Water in and drainage out are another again, and at many venues drainage is the constrained one, because it depends on where the building can actually take it rather than where you would like it.
Order them as a set, on the same day, against the same deadline. Exhibitors who order power in the advance window and then discover in month two that they also needed air are paying floor rate on the second order and hoping there is capacity left for the third.
Ask one question before you specify any of it: what happens to this machine if a service is late. A machine that simply sits there is an inconvenience. A machine that is the entire reason forty people booked a meeting at your booth is something else.
What under-ordering actually costs
Ordering less amperage than the machine draws does not produce a slightly slower machine. It produces a machine that trips, in front of the people you flew in to meet, and an upgrade bought at floor pricing on a day when the electrical contractor is serving the whole hall at once.
Over-ordering is the cheaper mistake, but it is still a mistake. You pay for capacity you never drew, at every show, if you copy last time’s order forward without checking it.
Transformers are a rental with a deadline
Because a transformer is a rental line item on the exhibitor kit, it obeys the same rules as everything else there: an advance rate, a standard rate, and a floor rate, with the spread between them applying to identical equipment. It also obeys availability. There are a finite number of transformers in a hall, and NPE is a show where a great many exhibitors want one.
Ordering it in the advance window is not just cheaper. It is how you find out early if the answer is no.
What to send us, and when
Four things get a preliminary layout and a real range moving: nameplate specs, meaning voltage, phase, amperage and frequency; your compressed air and water or drainage requirement if any; the machine footprint, height and weight; and your booth number and size.
Send them in month six, not month two. Utilities are the input that decides a machinery floor plan, and a floor plan is what everything else is priced from.
Plan the utilities. Then plan the graphics.