ice rink maintenanceA client of ours ran a rink for three years. In that time he replaced the condenser twice and drained and recharged the entire glycol system once. The total came to more than 200,000 RMB. He asked me whether the rink was just a hole that money falls into. I told him no — the problem was that he had been treating it like a water pump instead of a car.
In this business, the money is not in the build. It is in the running. The build has a price tag on it. What really hurts is that two or three years in, the maintenance bill climbs every year and never quite gets finished. Why? Because most facilities make the same mistake: they treat maintenance as "fix it when it breaks." And a refrigeration system is exactly the kind of equipment where fixing it only after it breaks is the most expensive possible strategy.
An ice rink does not freeze its ice directly with refrigerant. There is a layer in between — a glycol-water solution that acts as the secondary coolant. The chiller cools the glycol, and the glycol runs through the pipes buried under the ice pad and freezes the ice.
The trouble lives in that glycol layer. The industry standard concentration is 40%, and projects in hot climates or with lower evaporating temperatures use 50%. Glycol circulates year-round at around -10 °C, in contact with air and metal, and it slowly oxidises. Oxidation produces acid. Once the acid is there, it starts eating the pipework, the plate heat exchanger, and the pump impellers.
Once the corrosion goes far enough, a pipe perforates or the plate heat exchanger starts leaking, and the glycol escapes into the ice-pad pipework — or into the ice itself. At that point it is no longer a matter of "topping up the glycol." At best, the whole loop is drained, flushed, and refilled. At worst, the pipework is scrapped and re-laid. Industrial-grade coolant at 99.9% concentration runs to roughly 10,000 RMB per tonne. Run the numbers on a 1,000 m² facility: a single drain-and-refill costs tens of thousands in coolant alone, before you count labour and downtime.
What to do: test glycol concentration and pH once a year. Top up when the concentration falls. Treat pH below 7 as a warning. If it has gone acidic, change the fluid. And when you change it, do not cut corners with generic industrial-grade glycol — use a purpose-formulated rink coolant with the inhibitor package already in it.
The condenser is where the refrigeration system dumps its heat. Air-cooled units usually sit outside the plant room or on the roof, exposed to weather and dust, and within a few months the fins carry a mat of dust, catkins, and oil film.
A fouled condenser triggers a chain reaction: worse heat rejection → higher condensing temperature → higher compression ratio → more compressor power → a climbing electricity bill. Then the condensing pressure rises high enough to trip the high-pressure cut-out, and the compressor starts short-cycling under pressure. Its service life drops sharply.
The industry rule of thumb: every 1 °C rise in condensing temperature cuts cooling capacity by about 3% and raises power consumption by 2 to 3%. Going one summer without cleaning the condenser routinely adds 10% to the power bill. The arithmetic speaks for itself.
What to do: wash the air-cooled condenser fins with a pressure washer or coil cleaner every quarter, and clean the plant-room vents on a schedule. Do not wait for a high-pressure alarm.
The pipework under the ice pad (PE or stainless steel) is the nightmare failure — because it is buried under the ice, and repairing it means tearing the whole ice pad up.
Three common causes of a frozen, split pipe:
Weak glycol concentration. The freeze point does not go low enough, and in extreme weather or during a shutdown, the coolant freezes and expands, splitting the pipe.
No drain-down or antifreeze before a seasonal shutdown. Low-concentration glycol left in the pipes freezes.
A pump failure or a valve closed by mistake. The coolant stops moving, and the stagnant section freezes.
What to do: set the glycol freeze point 8 to 10 °C below the system's lowest evaporating temperature, and fit a concentration alarm. Before a shutdown, either raise the concentration or drain and add antifreeze. Inspect the pump and valves on a schedule so that water never sits still in the loop.
That table looks simple, but nine out of ten facilities never manage the two "monthly" rows. And those two rows are the cheapest and the most valuable.
One more thing. Many people confuse an ice rink's refrigeration system with snowmaking equipment. They are two different things: a rink uses pipework and a secondary coolant to freeze ice, while a snow venue uses air coolers and snow guns to spray snow. This article covers rink refrigeration only; snow venues deserve their own piece another day.
There is one stream out of a refrigeration system that almost everyone throws away — the rejected condenser heat. The chiller dumps it to atmosphere all year. Heat recovery captures it to heat domestic hot water, warm the changing rooms, melt the ice pit, or even heat a neighbouring pool.
The arithmetic is solid. We have designed full heat recovery at 40% efficiency on large-scale indoor snow projects, and we have accumulated a good number of comparable cases. A rough example: a 600 m² rink with a 270 kW chiller running at half load day-to-day rejects roughly 100 to 200 kW of condenser heat. At 40% recovery, that is a steady few tens of kilowatts — enough to heat anything from ten to several tens of tonnes of hot water a day.
Over a year, that often means savings in the tens of thousands on electricity or gas, with a payback of one to three years. The exact figure depends on chiller size, running hours, and local energy prices, so it has to be calculated per project. More important, heat recovery steadies the condensing temperature, which lets the chiller run more efficiently and last longer. So it is not "maintenance" at all — it does maintenance and energy saving in one move.
Put bluntly, a rink's refrigeration system is like a car. Treat it as a tool and it will be in the shop every few weeks. Service it the way the manual says and it will run quietly for a decade. Test the glycol once a year, wash the condenser once a quarter, drain and add antifreeze before a shutdown, and add heat recovery where the budget allows. Do those four things and the maintenance bill will not climb year after year — it will fall.
Beijing Yangsheng Ice & Snow Technology Co., Ltd. | Full-service ice and snow venue design, refrigeration system construction, and turnkey project delivery (yssnow.com)
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