INSTALLATION is as easy as 1,2,3
1. Find and stake your site.
2. Put up your sides.
3. Drop liner and fill.After staking out a sight setting the boards is a simple matter of placing your wooden stake supports in the ground and setting the boards.
Once the boards are in place you are ready to roll out the liner.
Two people can easily handle the liner, one on each side, to put it in place.
Now you are ready to fill and freeze.
First Timers How-To
Important items to consider when choosing the best site for your rink. First: Select a location near an easily accessible water source to fill your rink and resurface your rink when needed. Second: A convenient location plus, the rink should run parallel to the house if possible, to avoid pucks being shot directly at the house. Third: The pitch or levelness of your sight. Pitch may be important if you want a clean looking rink or don't want to end up filling your rink with 30,000 gallons of water. A site that has a pitch of 6" or less is best. Result: Less effort to install the side boards, using less water and take less time to get your base ice going. Fourth: Size of your ice rink -- open space availability will be the determining factor of how big you can make your rink. Budget and appearance will be the next. A quick recap of the four major factors and we'll detail each factor separately.
1. ACCESS TO WATER 2. CONVENIENCE OF USE 3. PITCH OF THE RINK SITE 4. SIZE OF THE RINK
1. ACCESS TO WATER is important during the skating season. It will be to your advantage to have the rink close so you don't have to haul your hose when it's 10 degrees outside. You'll be glad you don't have to haul out 300' of hose every time you want to resurface. It's great to be able to set your hose outside the house, hook it up and resurface. Two good items to have available are either a quality hose reel or large plastic bucket (muck bucket or garbage can). When you're done resurfacing you'll need to bring your hose back inside so it doesn't freeze. When the hose is brought inside it will have some water left in it. If you have the hose reel most of the water will be dispersed while winding it up, or if you have a hose bucket the water that drains will be contained leaving no mess.
2. CONVENIENCE OF USE is why you are or are not considering building your own ice rink in the first place, so make it as convenient as possible. Out the door and on the ice is best, but you have to consider windows, doors opening and viewing the rink from inside. A rinks about 20' from the house makes great viewing from the house. You can see everywhere on the rink from any facing window -- you can just let the children out to skate and watch for any mishaps while warmly conversing with friends and neighbors. Plus, you won't have to shovel a very long path to the rink.
3. PITCH OF THE RINK SITE may be more important to some folks than others. Have a level site to work with? Great! With level ground the sides are easy to put up. With un-level ground we help make it easy. That's why we have the Geo Rink system for building an ice rink. Ninety-nine percent of all backyards will not be flat. A yard that is perfectly flat does not have proper drainage away from the house and shouldn't have water added onto it because it may cause flooding problems in the spring. A Backyard with an 18" pitch is quite a bit, but we have customers that have built rinks with a 30" pitch without problems. Just make your sideboards higher and stronger, which will support the weight of the water on the deep end. How can this be done? With a rink size of 60' x 90' and with an 18" pitch it would take a friend and yourself about 4-5 hours to complete the old way of stake and sideboard construction and about 30-40 minutes to lay out the liner. With Geo Ice Rink brackets, it only takes about 1.5 - 2 hours to set up the boards! That is less than 50% of the time it takes to spray a rink to completion and get the ice surface you'll get from a single, time saving flood. Your ice surface will always be level when filling a Geo Rink system to get a base, as water will always seek its own level. No more skating up down and over hills!
4. SIZE OF THE RINK should be determined by several factors. The first is your available space. If you have the space and budget, go big. You'll enjoy your rink much more when you have more room, especially when you have skating parties. Everyone will have room to skate around without bumping into each other. If you're not sure if you'll use your rink enough to make it worth your while, start smaller. You can always decide to go bigger in a year or two, and continue to use the brackets, boards and equipment that have already been purchased. Besides space and budget, the people that will be using the rink will determine the size as well. When your rink is just for children, you can go smaller and be very satisfied, as they don't need a huge rink to make it feel huge to them. On the other hand, if you're an experienced skater your self, you'll be able to cover a 30' span rather easily with one stride, which doesn't end-up being really fun if you're an avid adult skater. The choice is entirely up to you, the "rink manager", but we can tell you that we have heard the following time after time "I SURE WISH WE WOULD'VE GONE BIGGER!"
A Rink Buyer's Guide
If you haven’t purchased your rink yet, and are trying to make up your mind on what to do, ask yourself the following:
1) Liner warranty: Geo Ice Rink liners are warranted to hold the water when you get it. Some warranties on the market are for a 5 year “UV warranty”. That’s fine, but UV damage is not going to be the problem as the liners are covered with Snow and Ice during usage, so the UV doesn’t affect the liner. You need a good strong liner to do the work.
2) Can the height of the sides be adjusted? Does the system you’re looking at have a system in place to adjust for the slope in your yard, or does the yard have to be perfectly flat for the system to work? The Geo Rink system will simply adjust to slopes in a yard, by simply changing the board height. No need to stack foam or wood blocks under the sides to get them to the right height. Geo Ice Rink Brackets will adjust to 16” of water without any additional support needed and up to 30" with Bracket Steel Stakes.
3) How long has the company been around? We have been in business since 1982.
4) Market Reputation? Did you get a referral to use a particular rink system? Do you know someone that had a working rink of what you’re looking at purchasing?
5) Actual Photos of Rinks and Products: When looking at buying a rink system, make sure you know what you’re actually buying. Do you see close up photos of what you’re actually buying. What are the sides? How do they adapt to uneven ground? Do you see actual rink pictures showing customers rinks in use with the product being used? On a pitched site?
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