Old Wives Tale # 1 Warm water freezes faster then Cold???
Not! Just think about that for a minute!
Old Wives Tale # 2 It takes x number of days to build and freeze your rink?
Many factors including temperature of each day and night, amount of snow that has fallen in your waiting water pool and how much sun or shade your rink has greatly influence the freezing times.
Old Wives Tale # 3 You can paint or color your rink surface with lines, with out a problem? You can, but you need almost complete shade or our special Solar Ice product. We still recommend our Solar Ice product for smaller areas like your center ice logo. Our special product made from plastic sheeting reduces the temperature above your ice rink logo by 7 degrees so on sunny days while playing you can still play with minimal logo melt. As always with a logo in the sun prior to and after your game cover it up with our white puckboard to preserve it.
Old Wives Tale # 4 You can’t build a rink with out snow? As long as you have cold below freezing all night and for most of the day and an Ultimate Outdoor Rink concept, a rink is a reality.
Old Wives Tale # 5 You need hot water for a flood. Hot water helps, but it isn’t totally necessary. Here’s the skinny…No b.s. Cold water is already 5 -10 degrees warmer than the ice surface. That’s a good start. Warm water is better than cold if you are trying to fix your surface imperfections. Hot water is best if you really need to level your bumps and issues caused by a weather front that has passed through your area leaving a mess of your ice surface. Hot water however, is not a necessity but on occasion has its benefits.
Old Wives Tale #6 You need to build your rink when the ground is frozen? Here is the wife’s tale in all it’s glory…… My rink is melting from underneath because the ground wasn’t frozen when I started building???? The reason this is a valid observation is because ice floats and all the melted water is underneath. In truth, the warm air above is actually doing the melting and the melted water is running underneath your existing ice. You now essentially have an iceberg in your rink box.
If you waited for frozen ground this would delay your start time to somewhere in the neighborhood of mid to late December for many geographical areas. Who wants to wait to build their rink in the cold? when it can be done sooner.
A 6 pack of mistakes often made by rookie rink builders.
1. Trying to seam 2 or more pieces of poly together
2. Not understanding the slope where you have positioned your rink frame. Many issues would develop from this.
3. Making the outdoor rink frame the same size as the liner
4. Fastening the liner to the inside of your outdoor rink frame before the water gets added and not allowing the liner to settle into the lay of the land previous to fastening. Liner settles and ice rink liner tears and all tears are now below the water line.
5. Not doing enough homework and trying to install your outdoor rink in a hurry because there is cold front coming. Hurry cause errors.
6. Needing to somehow level you site or your outdoor rink frame because you have misjudged the outdoor rink slope or grade in the area that you have chosen and then doing it with snow? Please, please, don’t use snow to prop up your low side framing. Suffice to say snow melts during mild conditions. What would you do then?
….and please, for your sake, don’t add lines to your rink for a pro look unless you have complete shade. The sun attracts to your dark lines and causes solar melt on your outdoor rink surface where there is anything dark, like lines, leaves, pine cones etc. This would mean that a slushy mess is created and your skating surface ruined where your lines have been added. If you have complete shade in your rink building area lines are a sweet addition.
