Time to fill?

[JDW]

Rink is up. 10 day forecast starting friday shows only 1 day above freezing(35 f). 35/24, 26/14, 24/16, 30/20, 31/26, 32/28, 35/26, 30/21, 32/28, 31/22. Maybe I'm just getting anxious. The last three days have been cold at night, but 38/40 and sunny during the day. I checked the ice on my pool cover and had a 1/2". That's on top of a black cover. My rink is mostly shade, only sees sun early morning/late afternoon. The ground was hard today until around 3. Should I wait or take a shot at it. I'm thinking winter is going to be cold and long the way the past few months have been.

[kevmac]

With those temperatures on the horizon, why wouldn't you fill? You are going to fill at some point, why not get a jump with those temperatures and maybe it stays. Best case is that you might be skating by next weekend. Worst case is... actually I don't see a worst case.

FYI: My rink is 3/4 fill (gradual fill off my well). I'm hoping to hit the same cold temperatures here in Ottawa (-1/5, -9/-2, -12/-6, -13/-1, -3/1, -10/-4, -12/-8) . I love seeing that -12, -13, -10 and -8 temperatures in the forecast. Did the same thing last year and I skated on November 30th and we played pickup on the rink December 16th.

Kevin

P.S. I really wish you guys down south would switch to the metric system. It's so much easier.
Conversion of temperatures for you imperialists: 30/41, 16/28, 10/21, 9/30, 27/34, 14/25, 10/18

[JDW]

I'm all set to fill tomorrow, hoses laid out, all things ready to go. Forcast still looking okay, 10 day out looking at 33/25, 34/27 for the last two days. Sorry for the (F) degrees, habit, I work at a small airport in northern Michigan and our weather reports in (C), but local weather is still (F). I'm just worried about snow. Living in a snow belt area the not so smart weather guy may say little to no accumulation, then we get 4" of wet snow. At the moment we have a slight chance of snow Saturday night. If the 10 day forecast doesn't change much by morning, I plan on filling tomorrow.

[kevmac]

Snow! One of the evilest creations against backyard rinks. It never fails that it snows at least once between the first freeze and before the ice is strong enough for you to walk on. Darn stuff will insulate the water and now allow it to freeze as fast. Hopefully your water won't freeze before it snows and the wet stuff will just increase the amount of water in the liner.

We are expecting rain/snow mix tomorrow and Saturday so I'm hoping for the same thing.

Fingers crossed!

[JDW]

Light drizzle at the moment. Loading all necessary parts in the truck tonight so i' m ready to go out and fill tomorrow. 10 day forecast still looking good. If no changes in forecast in the morning I'll start filling.

[YooperHockeydad]

JDW I am up in Marquette and just started tonight with the low on saturday just being 8. Best of luck to you. I think if you mix the snow that supposed to come with the water it might just give you more volume? Who know but wouldn't it be nice to be skating on thanksgiving?

Scott

[Reider]

Hey guys - I'm also looking to start my fill right away. This weekend has some snow in the forecast but it looks like I could start on Monday.

Here's my question - Like Kevmac, I'm also filling off a well so I'll go gradual. If I start to fill at 6PM Monday evening, am I likely to get an inch filled before midnight or so (6 hours)? I know it's hard to say exactly but I'm looking for a rough idea. Basically, should I bank on being up all night to get an inch filled each night next week? :)

[Reider]

I'm going to answer my own question and let you guys poke holes in it. :)

The big assumption here is that the water flow is an average of 2.5GPM. I really don't know that number and I'll have to test it when I get going but it's a start.

My rink is 30 x 48 feet. It's relatively level for slope with an inch difference in one corner when I did the test.

If I want a total of 4" of water, that's .33 of a foot. Using a pool calculator (http://tinyurl.com/m8sg66z) with the above numbers I came to a total of 3564 gallons needed. With 2.5 GPM that is 1425 minutes or almost 24 hours. If I go an inch at a time I'm at roughly 6 hours per inch of fill.

Rough numbers all based on an assumed GPM but based on your real world experience, does this seem about right to you guys?

[MLeslie347]

Sounds about right. You'd be surprised how close you can get to your fill time estimate if you sit down to do the math, just like you have.

I used a 5 gallon bucket to estimate my GPM the first year I did my current rink and I'm somewhere between 5 - 5.5 GPM. Unfortunately, I have some slope to my rink so had to break the rink up into small sections to estimate the volume, but came up with an estimate of ~9,700 gallons, so was thinking around 30 hours.

Couldn't believe it, but in the end was right in the ballpark at a hair under 29 hours. Not bad for some crude calculations.

[JDW]

If I was on Facebook I would have unfriended mother nature this morning. By noon I had 2" of snow, not planned, so I got a late start on the rink. Had to shovel the snow off before putting the tarp down. Started filling at 12:30pm and just turned the hoses off at 6:30. I'll post some pics tomorrow.
I didn't try to calculate filling time since I had two containers with 300 gal each plus I was pumping water off the top of my pool cover while also running the well.