26 May Only Cold Water to Flood? It Made Me Very Nervous!
You hear the words “cold water flood” and you might be nervous too.
You know how bad cold water flooding is for your ice. All that trapped air. All that resulting snow from fragile ice. What a headache! You’ve been there, done that, and you don’t want that bad ice ever again.
With REALice, it’s about how the water is treated, not about temperature. By using pressure instead of temperature, the resulting low-pressure zone pulls the air from the water and gathers it into one long string of air. That’s different from heating the water, where individual air bubbles become apparent, one at a time, as the water gets warmer. Put a pot of water on the stove to boil, you’ll soon see many individual air bubbles becoming apparent, clinging to the bottom and sides — appearing by the hundreds as the water gets hotter. Instead of individual pinpricks of air, REALice brings them together. That’s why the resulting floodwater is denser, has better heat-transfer properties, and is runnier (lower viscosity) compared to heated water.
Very Nervous
John O’Neill has been doing the ice for over 30 years. When he started working at Edge Sports Center in Bedford, MA and found out they didn’t use hot water in the floodwater tank anymore, he was very nervous.
But what he discovered is REALice has eliminated ice challenges that hot water floods would create. Like paint migration. He doesn’t get that with the cold water floods. And summer ice that’s slow to set up? Not an issue anymore with REALice.
Accidental REALice Ice Maker
O’Neill became an accidental REALice ice maker. The system was there when he began working there and there were no options to go back to hot water floods. He admits that if he’d been asked to consider using the treated cold floodwater system before he’d ever used it, he would have said “a flat-out ‘NO’!”. But not anymore. With REALice, he’s providing a better ice sheet for his user groups, at a much lower cost than hot water floods.
