That's right, not bumps or lumps...humps. How do I avoid these buggers??

We had some warm weather the last two days, with highs in the mid 30s, and a bit of rain. This of course softened up the ice a bit. By yesterday it looked like a fairly flat, semi watery surface on the rink.

Then it got cold again last night. This morning my surface is certainly skatable, but has a bunch of small (1 to 5 or so inches across) humps on it! What the heck!

I gather that these are caused by the surface water freezing and then the water below freezing, expanding up and out and creating a "boil" or a "zit" type feature on the topography of my slab. True, they are easy enough to get rid of with a short skate and a resurfacing...but is there any way to avoid them entirely?

I get these occasionally when I flood. I can't figure out if it is correlated to air temp, water temp, moon phase, etc?

Any ideas out there?

The dreaded ice humps seem to happen when you have too much water on your ice and it gets cold rapidly. Similar to the dreaded shale ice, the surface water freezes first except in this case there is too much water under the frozen surface with nowhere to go except up (much like a volcano is built I guess). If they are big enough, they are solid on the outside but porous on the inside.

The best way to avoid this is to keep large amounts of water off your ice when you are expecting a cold snap. I had a bad experience a couple of years ago where the 'humps' were quite extreme and I had to resort to attacking them with an axe then filled the resulting craters with warm water and let freeze. Looking at today's forecast of +10'C and rain, I will be addressing this issue again on Thursday or Friday when it starts dipping below the freezing mark again. I'm considering pumping or possibly siphoning any large amount water of my ice before it dips too low - haven't decided yet.

Kevin

Interesting..... glad i read this...

It has been warm here for the past three days the side walks and street ditches look like running rivers. The snow is melting so fast. The slap is still good solid Ice but there is a inch or so of water and rain water on the top. Should i be trying to get this off before tonight when it dips below zero again and is supposed to hold at below freezing temps for a few weeks?

My rink is small so if i had some lumps a bucket and hot water should work well and not be to labour intensive. I would hate to lose an inch of water from my slab.

what would you do?

kd,

Knowing that you have a corner where the ice is especially thin, you may want to leave the water on the ice in order to build up your thickness and then deal with the humps with a floor scraper and some warm water. I have ample ice thickness (6-8" at my shallowest point) so I tend to try and avoid any further repairs by being preemptive.

Cheers
Kevin

Well I pumped a lot of water off the rink last night only to awake to the rink covered in water (easily over an inch of standing water) - it rained all night! When I left for work, the temperature outside was a balmy +6'C (~43'F) and it has been dropping ever since. By the time I get home this evening it will have dropped 14 degrees to -8'C and will continue to drop to -15'C by tomorrow morning (quite the 24 hour swing). Me thinks that I will be dealing with some 'humps' on Friday evening. :-)

We need a retractable canvas "roof" type product....

I should be able to test the hypothesis mentioned above over the next couple of days...had a nice slab Monday, then super warm temps and rain for the last 48 hours, and now dipping into the 20's for the next few days.

I bet you get "humped"!!!!

Well, when I left for work yesterday, it was +6'C, raining and the rink was covered in water. When I got home, it was -7'C and the rink was pretty much solid ice. I think I got lucky with how it got cold gradually because there wasn't too many humps on the surface. I went out after the kids were in bed and resurfaced 3 times while it was -13'C and only had to use the ice scraper 3 times to get rid of a couple of small bumps.

Hope everyone else was as lucky as me. We'll be skating tonight!

Cheers to a splendid ODR weekend.
Kevin

I think this would work well for removing "Ice humps" Torch them off!!

http://www.princessauto.com/pal/product ... -Torch-Kit