Energy usage ice arenas
Energy use in ice arenas
Indoor rinks are among the most energy-intensive buildings a municipality owns. Refrigeration, pumps, fans, heating and lighting run for most of the year, often sixteen hours a day at weekends, to keep one surface frozen.
Where the energy goes
Refrigeration dominates: a plant cools a brine solution pumped through pipes under the ice grid, typically held at 16–17°F. Everything that puts heat into the sheet or the air makes that plant work harder, and most rinks add heat deliberately several times a day by flooding with water heated to 120–160°F.
The rest is lighting, ventilation, dehumidification and building heat, and in most arenas those are easier to see on a bill than to change.
The water you flood with
Floodwater is the one load an operator controls directly and daily. Hot water has to be heated, then cooled back down to freezing by the plant, then the new ice chilled to the set point.
ASHRAE puts it plainly: the resurfacing water temperature affects the load and the brine temperature required to freeze the floodwater, and maintaining good water quality may permit lower floodwater temperatures and less volume.
ASHRAE Handbook, 2010
That's the whole argument for conditioned water in one sentence, written by an engineering body with nothing to sell. How REALice does it →
More from the Ice Academy: 20 ways to reduce ice rink costs · lower the rink's carbon footprint · optimal ice temperature
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