Third year doing a rink - I was very lucky the last two years and no issues.

Made the rink much bigger this year and been out a few times and all is good. Two issues have since popped up, wondering if others are having the same problems:

1. I have a leak 'somewhere' but don't know where. I can see that there is water on the outside of the rink and pooling. It's not disastorous yet, but am very worried for the rest of the year. The leak is in the area of about 10 inches of water, so doubtful it will fully freeze.

2. This weekend in Southern Ontario, we got a dump of snow. I was away and couldn't get to it until it pushed water up and gave us the dreaded slushy mess. I spent hours shoveling the rink down to bare ice again, but have noticed now that the water level is way down (by a few inches). I need to 'top it up' - but don't just want to put the hose on it for a few hours to get the levels back up in fear that the hose will just bore a hole in the ice and raise the ice slab up vs. adding solid ice on top of the slab. Any suggestions?

Great forum btw - just found it and have learned so much already.

Adam

Leaving the hose run will in fact bore a hole in your ice. You could try bucket dumps; this is when you have a garbage can on your ice and fill it with the hose, then dump it. I've never done it but others swear by it. Or you could build the ice back up gradually with subsequent resurfaces. This is my preferred method but it takes time and patience.

I had a leak last season, and any amount of water I put down just drained out for the most part. What I did, was mixed up a big ol garbage can of slush and went around the whole rink and packed some slush between the existing ice and the boards, so maybe 3 or so inches up the boards. Once that froze up, it created a kind of "bowl" effect on my rink, and allowed me to dump garbage cans of water onto the rink without worry of the water running down the sides and draining out through the leak in my liner. I ended up actually using two big garbage cans at a time. I build a little rig with copper pipe, in which I could hook up my hose, and it would sit into the two garabage cans and fill them both up at once. I then threw a soccer ball in each pail and went inside to watch the hockey game. Looking out the window, once I could see the balls at the top of the cans, I knew it was time to go outside and dump them. Got that idea on the internet somewhere, may even have been here, and it works great.