Altona’s brand new ice plant at the Sunflower Gardens Arena is up and running, and town staff hope to have people out on the ice by this weekend.
The old ice plant gave up the ghost this fall after decades of service, shared Sarah Cail, manager of community services for the Town of Altona.
“At the beginning of the season, while performing pre-start up checks, it was discovered that there was a critical failure with the Sunflower Gardens Arena Ice Plant ammonia-based chiller,” she said. “After 22 years of service, it failed and was unable to be repaired.”
Town council soon after approved the purchase of a replacement at a cost of $180,000, which came out of the town’s Millennium Exhibition Centre Building Reserve Fund. That fund still has about $174,000 in it for future unexpected expenditures, Cail noted.
The new chiller was delivered, installed, and commissioned earlier this month, but it does take a little while to get suitable ice down on the rink surface.
There are a lot of user groups chomping at the bit to get out on the ice, Cail acknowledged, and she thanks them for their patience and understanding.
“The ice plant was started up yesterday,” she shared on Friday, “and it is cooling effectively. They’re going to start to put the water down today and they’re going to be flooding all week and working all the way through the weekend. Then we’ll start painting the lines.”
If all goes according to plan, the arena should be able to open by Saturday.
“That’s the goal,” said Cail. “And we’re going to keep updating user groups in the community as that progresses, just to make sure that everything works just the way it should.
“Usually it takes us nearly two weeks to make ice, about 10 days,” she noted. “We are compressing that timeline a bit, working through the weekend and trying to get it open sooner. It does take a bit of time, because you have to do it in layers.”
This new unit is a bit larger and should run more efficiently than the old one, which was originally slated for replacement in 2028.
