Troubleshooting

All is not lost! The BEST thing to do is nothing! If you have just filled your rink and it froze over with a little ice and you get a big snow storm, the weight of the snow on the ice will force the ice downward. The underlying water will be forced up by the weight and pressure of the snow in-between the liner and the ice, turning the snow into slush on top of the skating surface. If your ice is too thin to get on and clean, you basically can do nothing. The best scenario is for the weight of the snow to push the ice down enough to force enough water onto the top of the ice so it ALL turns to slush. Let the slush freeze, and then you can skate on that base if it's smooth enough or resurface a few times to get it back to smooth. If it snows on ice that is already pretty thick (5 inches or more), and the slush is only around the edges of your rink, then you can tackle cleaning it off. We recommend calling "more than a few friends" over to help with this. make sure you clean ALL of the slush off of the rink in one session. Otherwise, whatever you leave on the ice can freeze overnight and you’ll wake up to ice that will be full of FROZEN foot prints, shovel marks or the step-up where you stopped. Once you clean all the slush off, let the surface harden back up, then resurface as needed to get it back to glass.

Inevitably when when resurfacing and when it gets extremely cold the ice will obtain some cracks. First, let's answer why this happens. 1.When resurfacing, even with cold water, to the ice ANY water you put on the ice, is warmer than the ice itself, Even cold tap water comes out 55F/13C. Combine that with the best resurfacing happening at 25F/-4C and you get a 30/17 degree temperature differential. So just like pouring, even cold water over a glass full of ice...it will pop and crack while filling up. 2.When it gets extremely cold, say 5F/-15C your ice freezes "solid" and the winter air dries out and pulls the moisture out of everything, Including your ice. That water "was" the glue that was holding the ice together. Once the winter air dries out your ice, and the moisture has been depleted you will get 1-2-3-4 cracks the entire length of your rink. We call them Spider Cracks. You can do two things to get them repaired and help prevent further cracks: •Just like you may have seen on TV or the local rink when a hole is created in the ice, the ref or players will scrape some ice shavings, pack them in the hole, wet it and then smooth it over with a puck. Same goes for your backyard rink. Grab some snow (assuming you have some), and pack it in the holes and cracks, wet lightly and smooth over the best you can with a puck, or even a concrete trowel and let it freeze. •Before you get any cracks, or when you fix any holes or cracks you have in the ice, and it's cold enough and going to stay cold enough to keep your ice frozen, you should put many "thin" layers of water/ice on the rink, letting each layer freeze before adding another layer. This will give you a harder layered ice surface on the top and be less prone to cutting, chipping, and cracking as long as that "layered" ice stays frozen.

Just because the liner may be leaking doesn't necessarily mean it's the seams in the liner. The edges could've been damaged, a dog could have run through it, the neighbor could've poked holes in, a deer could've run through. These all sound like craziness, but these have all happened, amongst about 50 other problems. Once you find the hole (source of the leak), GET PICTURES. If it is determined that it was in fact a faulty liner, then of course we stand behind our product. Inevitably, some liners will get a hole or holes in them from a variety of sources. The easiest way I’ve found to find the hole(s) in the past on my own rink is as follows; Find the wet spot on the outside of the rink boards Stand in the center of the wet spot, facing directly up to the shallowest point of your rink. Since water can only flow downhill the hole will be somewhere between where you are standing and the shallow point your facing Now, it may not be directly in line, so start at the board edge checking 2’ left and right from where you are standing, and be sure to check the inside edges of the liner where the liner is against the board(s) first, then work your way down the board and then look on the bottom of the liner where it is on the ground, double/triple checking where the board meets the ground. Then, from there facing directly uphill again, carefully and thoroughly scan the bottom of the liner left & right, and as you scan further up towards the shallow end, begin to expand your scanning area left & right as you scan further away from the boards. You scanned 2’ either way near the board, and I would suggest when your 15’ uphill or more into the rink that you be searching an area that would then be 5’ left & right, or 10’ area side to side. To scan closer “in” the rink, you can place plastic garbage bags over stocking feet and carefully walk around in the water. If there’s a thin layer of ice, you can carefully break and remove the ice so you can see the liner. *** If you already have ice on the rink, I would say 3” or less, you’ll have to “carefully” break the ice with a hammer 12-18” from the sideboards and remove the ice in order to check the sides and/or the bottom for holes in the immediate area. Another technique I’ve heard clients try is to add food coloring to a cup of milk and pour that in the water when it’s calm. The food coloring in the milk is heavier than the water and has tendency to follow “the flow” to a potential hole. Drop the coloring close to where you think the hole might be, go away for a while and then come back to see if you have traveling color to a hole.

Repairing a NiceRink Liner-Inevitably some of you will get holes in your liner, whether from skates, sticks, shovels, dogs, deer, or the plastic football place kick holder left under the liner. Laugh if you will, we’ve had more than that come back to us since 1991. There are basically two options in repairing a liner. You can use either the NiceRink repair tape OR the underwater glue. They do not work together. One works independent of the other. Taping a liner-The liner “should” be warm, dry & clean that will be the easiest…..however….if you have a midseason hole or tear there are ways to fix it, just call and ask for the “Rink Doctor”. In optimum conditions, clean and dry both sides of the liner and tape both sides if accessible and press the tape in to place. If it’s a midseason fix, get Mama’s hairdryer out with an extension cord! Clean and dry the area to be patched as well as possible and cut a piece of patch tape according the size of the hole. Place the tape over the hole, and it will most likely not stick in place. Hold the tape in place and turn on the hairdryer and apply heat to the non-adhesive side of the tape and at the same rubbing the tape with your free hand. This will activate the adhesive through the material, and once activated, you should get a permanent bond. You don’t have to burn it on, just heat it up from the back and test the adhesion periodically by trying to remove a corner while heating up and you’ll be able tell when it’s adhered. Underwater Gluing a liner, Don’t read the directions on the tube of glue! This works, I had a deer put 15 holes in my liner in one run across it about 12 years ago with one of the original lining materials. The glue is not going to dry and be a permanent fix. This is only intended to “clog” a hole that is underwater midseason. I would suggest rubber medical gloves and a dry towel for this as the water is going to be VERY cold! Keep the glue in a warm area until ready to apply. For smaller holes, take a generous amount of the glue, 1” diameter should do for smaller punctures on your index finger and bring it down to the hole and sort of “smear” it over the hole and release it from your hand. What the glue will do is stick to the liner essentially “clogging” the hole up until spring when it can then be repaired permanently with the tape. For larger holes, use a scrap or corner piece of liner larger than the hole, apply a generous amount of glue around the edges of the patch piece, and then push that down over the hole in the water and apply pressure around the edges to get a seal. Then seal off the edges of the patch with more glue to make sure you get it all sealed up. Some clients have put a flat stone or brick that does not stick out of the water on top of larger patches and then just let it freeze into the ice to be sure there is enough continuous pressure to seal off larger holes that are underwater glue patched.

This is natural occurrence with freezing a large pool of water. Water actually freezes from the top down, and keeps creating ice from the top, down as long as it is below 32F/0C. Just like a lake or pond the surface skims over first and then it freezes downward with freezing temperatures. The NiceRink white liner will expedite this process, but it just takes the natural cold weather to keep freezing. A backyard ice rink doesn’t have to freeze solid to skate. Usually 4” of ice is enough to go ahead and skate.