How to Make an Ice Rink on Your Pond
Part 3: Maintaining Your Ice Rink
Congratulations! If you’ve followed our series on how to make an ice rink on your pond, you’re well on your way to creating a winter-sports wonderland for you and your family. Your rink will provide hours of entertainment all season long – as long as you keep it maintained.
How do you keep your rink glassy smooth? You don’t need a Zamboni, but you do need to do some regular scraping, sweeping and flooding to resurface and prime the ice. Here’s our three-step solution for maintaining a perfect surface on your rink.
Step 1: Clear the Surface
First, clear the entire surface of the ice with a broom, a flat head metal shovel and ice scraper. Sweep and shovel off the snow, and scrape down and remove all bits of ice and snow as they will freeze during the flooding process and create imperfections on the surface. Dips and holes are OK because they’ll fill with water, but lumps and bumps are not.
Step 2: Flood the Rink
Next, flood the rink with water. Rather than use a sprayer nozzle, which can cause a pitted and rough ice from all the water droplets hitting the surface, let the water flow directly from the hose and allow it to evenly cover the entire rink.If possible, use warm water to flood the area. Just like in a Zamboni, the warm water melts the surface of ice, correcting imperfections and allowing it to freeze smoothly. You can either fill buckets with warm water from your bathtub and slowly pour the water over the ice, or you can use an outdoor faucet with a thermostatically controlled hose, like a Thermo-Hose™, to keep water flowing out to the pond.
Step 3: Use When Cold.
With your rink resurfaced and smoother than a pane of glass, you want to keep it that way, right? Before you cut into the ice with your blades, consider the temperatures outside. Avoid using the rink during mild weather when your skates do significant damage to the ice. Instead, use the rink when it’s cold enough outside to keep that slick surface intact.
Skate Away!
Now that you’ve learned how to grow good ice rink ice, how to set up and create a winter wonderland, and how to maintain the rink all season long, it’s time to get busy making a rink of your own. Be safe, and enjoy your very own icy paradise!
In case you missed out, check out Part 1: Understanding How Ice Forms and Part 2: Creating Your Winter Wonderland.
