Our Chiller Tubing Arrives
So one of the things that we are doing to save money is to not buy ice mats. For those of you not familiar with how ice is made, you have a large chiller (industrial giant sized air conditioner) that cools a refrigerant down to a temperature around 14F. You then run this fluid in thousands of feet of small tubing over the surface that you want to convert to ice. Once the system is turned on, you then spray water on the outside of these tubes and it will freeze and make an ice surface.
To make this process easy, most people buy some sort of ice mat that might look like this picture.
You then rollout the mats and cover the entire surface to end up looking like this.
Whats nice about this system, is that if you are making a 3 sheet curling club, which is 45 feet wide, you only need to roll out 8 rolls of tubing to cover the entire surface. This is a pretty quick process, but one that comes at a price.
We are buying individual tubes to save a lot of money. The downside, instead of taking 8 passes to cover the ice, we have to roll out 276 passes of tubing. In my head, this was not going to be a big deal, but once the tubing showed up, it looks like a whole lot of time and effort to me.
I hope that we get a lot of volunteers to install our tubing.