What it takes to maintain an ice-skating rink
A beloved and longstanding staple of wintertime recreation, gliding around on knife-strapped boots is an annual must-do activity for families around the world. But while ice skating has been around for an exceptionally long time—scholars think it was developed in Scandinavia around 1000 BCE—manmade ice-skating rinks are a somewhat recent invention, created fewer than 150 years ago.
Since then, thanks to technological advancements, ice-rink construction and maintenance have been fine-tuned to best serve skaters’ needs. But not all rinks are created equal. Depending on the needs of hockey players, figure skaters, or casual rink-goers, and whether the rink is a seasonal outdoor facility, a permanent indoor rink, or a frozen body of water, rink maintenance can look quite different, experts say.
Permanent Indoor Facilities
There are some elements of ice-rink maintenance that are relatively constant regardless of the type of rink. These can include visual ice inspections, which involve assessing the ice for cracks and chips. Rinks often use a Zamboni (ice-resurfacing driver) to smooth things out and also add more water to the ice’s surface, and machines called edgers are run at the rink’s edges to keep them at a consistent right angle with the boards (the edges have a tendency to slope).
With indoor rinks, maintenance varies depending on the activity being serviced, says Kyle Lamkey, director of ice operations for the National Hockey League’s LA Kings.
Big indoor facilities, especially ones that cater to elite and professional athletes, are often built with building-wide systems that provide the operating teams with granular levels of control over different variables. Ideal ice conditions are different depending on the type of skating, says Lamkey, so having meticulous control is crucial to bring out the best in the athletes.
Figure skaters, for example, need ice on the softer side. “When ice is hard, figure skaters will cause blowouts with their toe picks,” which is when large chunks of ice get chipped out of the rink, says Lamkey. Soft ice prevents that, while also providing a softer surface to land on when figure skaters perform jumps. “We want to ensure they don’t get injured and make sure they can perform at the highest level,” he says.
Soft ice is achieved by maintaining a slightly warmer temperature. While ice for the general public is typically kept at 23 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit, figure-skating ice should be kept at 25 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit, Lamkey says. Hockey ice, on the other hand, should be kept colder than average, between 21 to 23 degrees Fahrenheit, to keep things “hard and fast.”
Depending on the temperature, humidity, and dew point, indoor rinks may need to be dehumidified. “We aim for 45 to 50 percent relative humidity,” says Lamkey. With higher levels, the moisture begins to affect the ice, increasing the rate at which snow builds up on the surface, which makes it hard to skate fast. Many facilities keep dehumidification equipment on-site for this reason.
Elite skating facilities are also increasingly turning to weather and climate reports to preemptively prepare the ice. “There's no one technique that will work in every facility,” says Lamkey, and climate and weather conditions are a big reason. For his Los Angeles, Calif. facility, he has observed that, when dry winds come in from the northeast, the dryness helps, and the ice doesn’t require as much dehumidification. Conversely, when moisture blows in from the ocean, it can be harder to maintain stable temperatures and humidity for the rink.
Seasonal Outdoor Rinks
For many casual skaters, temporary, seasonal ice-skating facilities are their first introduction to ice rinks. These facilities are often built in the fall, taken down in the spring, and usually deal with high traffic volumes during the open season.
Andre Sanders is a project manager for Magic Ice USA, which operates seasonal, outdoor ice-skating rinks throughout the U.S. He’s also the manager of the UPMC Rink in Pittsburgh, Penn., which welcomes about 85,000 to 90,000 skaters every year from mid-November through the end of February or the beginning of March, for a season of 102 to 108 days.
Building the UPMC rink in particular starts during the first weekend of October. After putting down specially-cut foam blocks to ensure the rink is level, the team lays down plywood and ethylene glycol piping that make up the base of the rink. Some outdoor rinks have permanent, underground cooling systems and piping that stay in place all year, even if the rink itself is deconstructed after the winter, he says—but the UPMC rink’s piping is installed and removed every year.
Workers build the ice up slowly, spraying small layers of water onto the surface at a time and letting it freeze before adding more. Many rinks have to paint the ice a few layers below the surface because it otherwise lacks the typical ice-rink look, says Sanders. But the white paint is also beneficial because white reflects heat rather than absorbing it, mitigating excessive melting.
Ice must be created in incremental layers because adding too much water at once prevents it from freezing, says Sanders. But another reason is, “if you try to make ice continuously, you get really crappy ice,” he says. “It’s hard, it's brittle, it doesn't really have strength.” Once the first crucial layers have been built up, installers can use a hose to flood the surface to bring the rink up to the desired level, Sanders says.
Depending on the rink and surrounding weather conditions, outdoor rinks should be between an inch and a half to 4 or 5 inches thick. “If we know it's going to be really warm, we'll build it up a little higher, because we know it's going to melt,” he says. “Or if it's going to be really cold, we'll keep it at the lower level, because we don't have to worry about melt-off.” UPMC’s chiller is typically set to 12 degrees Fahrenheit, but it might be lowered to 6 or 8 on a warm or windy day.
On days when there’s a lot of cold rain, the team will send the Zamboni out to suck up the excess water to prevent too much ice from building up. Warm rain creates holes in the ice, which have to be repaired by packing in ice shavings or snow and smoothing it over. But snowy days are particularly bad. “You can't let snow build up on the ice,” says Sanders. “If you do, you end up with really bad ice conditions” and crusty, uneven layers that are hard to fix. If operators know considerable snow is coming, Sanders says his team will stay out on the rink and sweep it off for as long as it can.
Naturally Frozen Skating Rinks
At the opposite end of the ice-skating spectrum are skating facilities made from natural bodies of water. The Rideau Canal Skateway in Ottawa, Ontario is one such rink, and with 4.8 miles (7.8 kilometers) of skating surface—equivalent to more than 140 NHL rinks, or more than 122 Olympic-sized hockey rinks—it’s the largest skating rink in the world.
By the time the canal freezes in December or early January, operators have already installed changing facilities, washrooms, and staircases that lead down to the ice, says Bruce Devine, the senior manager of facilities and programs at National Capital Commission, the group that operates Skateway. Once the ice is sufficiently safe to walk on, the team adds water to the surface until it’s the desired thickness of 10 to 12 inches. This usually requires 10 to 14 consecutive days of temperatures below 14 degrees Fahrenheit.
To ensure the ice is thick enough, and of a high quality, the team uses a radar machine that “sends a signal down to the bottom that bounces back up and tells us how thick the ice is,” says Devine. Workers also use an auger to drill and remove ice samples. The removed cylinders are measured and inspected for ice quality and density. If there are many ice bubbles, that indicates weaker ice. Once drilling is complete, team members also check the “free board,” the space between the top of the ice and water that fills the empty hole where the ice core was removed. The freeboard indicates how buoyant the ice is, and therefore how much weight it can safely hold.
Once the ice is deemed thick and safe, the staff adds tables, benches, maps, and signage. During the skating season, “we flood the ice every night, weather permitting,” he says. Operators sweep and scrape the ice surface so it’s smooth and clean, then add water to build up more ice and smooth any cracks—a process only possible if there’s no precipitation that night. Snow is the enemy of ice, so whenever there’s snow or freezing rain, the team works to remove it quickly with snowblowers and snowplows—as long as the ice is thick enough to safely do so. But on nights of heavy precipitation, the team might have to skip flooding the ice. In the morning, operators assess the ice for thickness and safety and decide whether skaters are permitted.
Climate change has made maintenance of the Skateway harder, says Devine. “Two years ago, we didn’t open at all,” he says. The weather was bad, the surface of the ice was too soft, and the ice wouldn’t have been able to hold the thousands of skaters that visit Skateway. This past season, from January to February of 2024, Skateway had only 10 open skate days during a season of 36 days. By comparison, the longest period of consecutive skating was 59 days in 2015, and the longest skating season lasted 90 days from 1971 to 1972.
Devine says the team is brainstorming possible changes to operations that might help the rink stay open longer, whether by using lighter equipment or switching up water-freezing methods. It remains to be seen if there are any interventions that will tangibly change current operations.