Things you need to know about an Ice Skating Arena
All the Details About an Ice Skating Arena. Attractive pictures on the smooth ice are just the beginning of a well-run ice skating arena. The correctly run arena is constantly dymanic with great attention paid to the temperature and the pipes and cooling machinery as well as everyday repairs to the outside of the ice itself. A quality ice skating arena will also have a large, mostly behind-the-scenes, maintenance crew. Having consistently smooth ice in an ice skating arena is very labor intensive.
An arena ice rink is the exact size as what is compulsory for an NHL rink. This means it is 200 feet in length, and 85 feet in width. When the ice is used for figure skating instead of hockey, the rinkis the same size but the ice is at a higher temperature and there are no lines on the ice. This makes for a large, smooth surface of ice, suitable for an NHL ice skating arena.
The top of the ice in an ice skating arena is frozen layer upon layer over a smooth cement slab with miles of refrigeration pipe wound through it. It is the cool temperature of the cement that contact freezes the ice. Eleven slender layers go into making the ice’s surface. Any painted lines or logos are painted on near the top of the layers and then iced over with a few more layers. The process of applying the layers takes anywhere fromseveral hours to a few days to set up, and even longer to take apart. Most of the day-to-day work done in an ice skating arena involves maintaining the layers of ice.
The temperature of the ice skating arena is crucial to the quality of the ice. Most NHL arenas keep the air temperature around 63 degrees, and the ice temperature ranges from 24 and 26 degrees. Figure skaters prefer an ice temperature that is between 26 and 28 degrees and adjusting to these differences can make maintaining a quality ice surface difficult. Also, the outside weather and it’s intrusion into the arena when people are coming and going can really degrade the ice. A fog could appear the ice if the ice skating arena does not provide as many as 12 humidifiers.
What seems as simple as slapping some water on a cold surface is actually an intense process. Hundreds of gallons of water run onto a freezing slab of concrete under which runs miles of refrigerated pipes in order to make the ice. An arena big enough for NHL action needs the watchful eyes of a large crew, especially if it is used for figure skating as well. Hyper activity goes on behind the scenes in an ice skating arena.
