Alright so it’s just entering the third week of November and already I’m dreaming of Christmas. The heart warming family gathering, the scrumptious food, the anticipation for happy faces as they open my presents, the warmth of delicious hot cocoa and yummy roasted chestnuts, the sounds of children’s laughter as they play out in the snow…oh I’m so pining for Christmas.
But you know, when I think of Christmas, I don’t just picture the above or Old St Nick, mistletoes and brightly lit Christmas trees, instead I picture the beautiful and breathtaking Christmas card scenes of lakes/waterways freezing over creating natural skating rinks (yes I know it’s dangerous) with the merry folks, young and old skating to cheery Christmas carols while some little ones help themselves to being the imaginative makers of a unique snowman or snow angel.
But these days you don’t have to wait for the winter to do ice skating, nor do you have to live in a country where the lakes are always freezed over. Ice skating is a sport enjoyed all over the world and the rinks are everywhere, even in the tropics! Only problem is, conventional ice skating rinks aren’t quite kind on the environment.
I mean, did you know the following facts about your popular skating rink:
Ice rinks are one of the most energy intensive consuming forms of recreation as they run on the same technology at work in refrigerators and air conditioners. Beneath the ice, you’ll find
- • Chillers
- • Steel pipes with pipe welds
- • Anti-freeze agent (usually brinewater)
Hard at work.
The only difference, ice rinks are massive in size and the refrigerant used doesn’t cool the ice directly. Instead, it cools brinewater (a calcium-chloride solution, which is pumped through an intricate system of pipes embedded in concrete underneath the ice.
Must knows:
- It takes at least two large water filtration systems to produce deionized water, which is essential for making clear ice.
- It takes approximately 12,200 gallons of water just to make an NHL sized ice rink.
- Approximately 10 miles of steel piping is required to be laid down beneath the concrete surface to successfully freeze an ice rink.
- The use of Glycol (anti-freeze) essential as it is chilled by compressors and flows continuously through the pipes 24 hours a day to keep the temperature of the ice surface at a cool 16 degrees.
So now you realise that your fun promising ice rink is highly draining of energy, what is the green option? To wait till winter isn’t quite the answer so the brilliant Japanese came up with the waterless/iceless skating rink concept.
In Toyama, Japan there is a special Ice Skating Rink that is made out of 80 pieces (6-ft by 3-ft, weighing 84lbs each and measuring under 1 inch thick)
A special wax is applied to the surface of the panels once assembled to create a surface that is nearly 90% as “slippery” as real ice. Normal unmodified ice skates will work effortlessly on it.
I believe plastic skating rinks have been around for a while now but there’s some advancement to the technology that makes the skating a better experience.
And it all sounds great, only as far as I remember skate runners do cut into the ice surface so I would expect that the plastic surface suffer the same fate. With ice that’s quite easily fixed because when the surface gets ‘undesirable’ we can just zamboni it back to ‘health’, with waxed plastic I’m not too sure.
