My dad was a "maker" of the first order. When faced with a problem, his solution was not to kill it, but overkill it.

So having suffered my first year with a backyard rink being the worst year in recent memory (north of Boston), I'm not considering refrigeration.

Has anyone tried to hack something like this together? Me and some engineer friends were thinking of trying to find a used chiller and build a mesh of PEX tubing. Sound crazy? Anyone tried this?

I know there are contractors that will take your $25k-$50k to build a permanent installation. I'm looking for portable and cheap.

I figured the PEX would be $1000 for a 25x50 rink. I've seen used chillers for $1k-$2k.

Anyone tried this?

I'd love to try and build something to hel maintain ice more consistently. I haven't found any DIY backyard rink chilling systems despite my searching the web.

I have been thinking about this too after the past few years where my ice didn't get thick enough before a snow came or nothing froze at all like last year. I think I am going to try it in two stages, the first being and "active/passive" cooling system.

Basically I would buy the PEX tubing to run in the water and hook it up to a pump, but have part of the loop run through several old baseboards out in the air. I figure that should help remove some of the thermal energy from the water quicker when the air temperature get's low at night. Maybe this would be enough to avoid the Chiller and specialty coolants.

I hope to save enough to try it this year. the PEX tubing you can always add to each year to improve your mesh density. Finding old or cheap baseboards is hard though. Other problem is standard pumps don't seem to be rated for below 40 degrees F.

J

No the water running through the tubes and pump would be separate because you'd want to add some anti-freeze or alcohol to prevent that from freezing. SO it would be just like a regular pro cooling system except your mesh density would be lower (unless you want to buy a few thousand feet of tubing and make your own mats!) and you would use passive heat exchange instead of a compressor based chiller.

Other option I though about was to just get a rubber trash barrel and use a sump-pump although again, I'm trying to identify a pump that will be happy for continuous use pumping a fluid at hopefully < 29 degrees.

J

Has anyone built their own PEX pipe and compressor/pump back yard refrigeration system?

I am contemplating building my own DIY refrigeration system. We live In southern Ohio so the weather is not ideal for an outdoor rink, a few weeks ago when I saw the forecast I jumped on the opportunity to build my first quick and easy rink. After a few days of skating it's now turning back to a pond, but it was so much fun that we're trying to figure out how to make it last all winter.

As a test we disassembled an old window air conditioner unit and dumped the cold side heat exchanger into a cooler of water (10 gallons @ 53 deg F to start). We were able to get the water down to about 34 F in a few hours before we turned it off. Huge chunk of ice on the cold side heat exchanger. We figured that it you were actually using an antifreeze solution (sounds like probably propylene glycol would be the best bet) you could get the water/antifreeze mixture as cold as you would need.

Now its just a matter of getting a pump and the tubing. I was wondering if it would work to use drip tubing that they sell at hardware stores? It seems to be about half as expensive as the PEX stuff, but looks like it might have a bit lower thermal conductivity. If its not too much worse I wouldn't mind using that at half the cost. Does anyone know what the mesh/tubing density of professional rinks is?

The good thing about this setup would be you could just add cooling power to the system as you pick up $40 used AC units on craigslist. The tubing seems like it will be the most expensive part.

Anyone have any thoughts or insights? Depending on if I get a pump or not I could try this idea for real.