When the Snow Melt Pit Stops Melting
by Colleen O'Shea
When your arena's snow melt pit stops working as it should, three things are being wasted:
- Operators' time
- The energy it takes to heat the hot water needed to melt the snow
- The water itself.
If your pit isn't working as it should, or like the snow melt pit pictured above, if it's never been set up properly, you can quickly figure out if the cost of fixing it makes economic sense. The U.S. Ice Rink Association has a formula to calculate how expensive it is to manually melt the snow. Get your pencil ready (or your spreadsheet open) and read about it here.
REPAIRS NOT IN THE BUDGET? CONSIDER A DE-ICER OR BUBBLER FOR YOUR SNOW MELT PIT
CanadianPond.ca from Lac-Brome, QC. is a specialist in anti-ice solutions for boats and docks. Their solutions range from avoiding the winter kill of fish in your backyard pond all the way up to protecting cargo ships and large docks. Their solutions are also used in Alberta’s Oil Sands.
Shayne Levoy, the Director of Sales for CanadianPond.ca, explains that deicing works by mixing the warmer water (at the bottom of a basin) with colder (at the surface with snow and ice).
“Breaking the surface tension stops the surface of the water from reforming ice,” Shayne says.
There are two different technologies available: propeller deicers and thaw line bubblers.
Propeller deicers (pictured above) are the least expensive of the two. They take more electricity, take up more place, gives a more vigorous mixing effect in a small area but come with the risk of creating slush. To use a propeller deicer, you would need to maintain at least 2 feet of water in your pit.
Thawline Bubblers are the more expensive option. They need less energy to run, but the only parts in the water is tubing. The tubes create a gentler deicing effect which is more more targeted — and you only need 7.7 cm (3″) of standing water to make them work.
Both options come in 120 or 240 Volt configurations (or 50Htz for Europe). There are add-ons that include timers and controls that can be set in a variety of ways, including photo cells and temperature.
The cost? Levoy figures, depending on what you need, that CanadianPond.ca can get you set up for under $1K (Canadian).
A MORE PERMANENT SOLUTION
Even snow melt pits in new facilities can underperform and require manual melting. At the Complexe 2 Glaces Honco in St. Romuald, QC., the snow melt pit was a problem worth fixing.
GREAT DESIGN
Opened in 2015, the Complexe is a modern, privately-owned twin pad, fitness and meeting centre and pro shop just outside of Quebec City, Quebec.
The layout of this facility is really nice. Both rinks are NHL-sized: the first has seating for 1,500 spectators. But the 2nd rink has no spectator seating at all! The viewing area for the 2nd rink is only accessible through the second floor restaurant/bar which connects both rinks. The dressing rooms and fitness centre are on the building's first floor, so players, coaches and referees are always separated from the spectators. You can take a virtual tour here - it's worth the click. They also have a mini-hockey rink and attract half a million visitors a year.
At the Complexe (in normal, non-COVID-19 times), flooding takes place an average of 14 times per pad per day. Their Zamboni room has one filling station for their two Zamboni ice resurfacing machines – one is electric, the other is natural gas. Tucked in one corner next to the filling station is the facility’s snow melt pit.
Alex Audy is the Operations Manager for the Complexe, and he explains the snow melt pit was the only issue the operations team has had. The pit had been designed to re-use waste heat from the refrigeration plant to run warm glycol through coils in the pit to automatically melt the snow.
The Pits
Like the property market, location is everything and the location of this pit’s coils was in the wrong subdivision, so to speak. Most of the coils had been located on just one side of the pit. Worse yet, they were a direct hit each time the ice resurfacing machine dumped the 100 cu. ft. or so of snow collected each time an ice make was made.
Consequently, the coils were prone to breaking. Even when they weren’t broken, there was never enough concentrated heat to melt the snow.
Because of that, Alex’s team ended up wasting hundreds of gallons of hot water each day trying to keep the growing mountain of snow in the pit melted. A large volume of water was continually being wasted, and, as critically, so was the manpower needed to do this mind-numbing job.
Fixing the snow melt pit so it actually melted the snow became a high priority item. Alex wanted more melting power — with no downtime due to broken coils.
With the redesign of the snow melt pit, the replacement coils were distributed away from the impact of the snow dump. As you can see from the picture above (on the right), a plastic shield was put into place to protect the coils and redirect the snow as it is being dumped. They also adjusted their temperatures. Now the pit water is kept at a consistent 26.6°C (80°F).
“It’s a great solution for a few reasons,” says Alex. “Now the snow dumped into the pit melts within two minutes of it hitting the water. Second, no water is wasted in melting the snow anymore, and third, the operators are able to perform much more meaningful tasks than spraying hot water onto the snow in the pit.”
OTHER RESOURCES
The Ontario Recreation Facilities Association (ORFA) has published Considerations For Designing An Ice Resurfacer Snow Melt Pit.
Consider reclaiming the water from your snow melt pit like they’re doing at the Scott Seaman Sports Rink in the M.D. of Foothills #31 in Alberta, Canada.
A version of this article was originally published on Re-Surfacing.com - Ideas for Icemakers. If you'd like stories like this delivered to your inbox, please subscribe!