How to win your hockey, pool
Backyard swimming pools can be transformed into skating rinks with a custom conversion service offered by a new Kelowna company.
Families can then get year-round enjoyment from an expensive recreational asset that would otherwise just be a hole in the ground through the fall and winter, says company founder Brent Dodge.
“It’s a great way to make use of that space, especially if you have kids,” Dodge, owner of West Coast Outdoor Ice Rinks, said in an interview Tuesday. “It gets them off the iPad and outside, having fun and getting some exercise.”
Dodge, whose family moved to Kelowna in 2018, says he was looking at the pool in the backyard of their Chute Lake home last year when he wondered what would be involved in converting it to a rink.
“I grew up in Williams Lake and I’ve always missed not being able to skate on ponds and lakes,” said Dodge, 36. “You can’t do that easily in Kelowna, but a lot of people have pools so it just seemed like a natural connection.”
He did a lot of research on the conversion possibility, consulting with structural engineers and tradesmen, and reviewing online resources.
He has built one rink atop his own family’s pool, another at a Kamloops’ property, and is busy providing quotes to interested homeowners around the Okanagan.
One option offers a custom-sized and fully installed platform with boards suitable for flooding for about $10,000. Skating is only possible when temperatures are cold enough to hold ice.
A rink with synthetic ice costs about $20,000 and the top-of-the-line model with a chiller to keep ice in place at temperatures up to 10 C costs about $50,000. “That is a lot of money,” Dodge acknowledges, “but then you have an investment that lets you use your pool area for an extra four or five months every year.”
The engineered rinks, of about 20 feet by 40 feet in size, put much less pressure on a pool deck than the structures are typically built to support, Dodge says.
His own family’s pool-turned-rink doesn’t have a chiller, but now that temperatures have turned colder, the ice is firm and holding well, Dodge says.
“The first day it was ready at the end of January our two girls were out there skating for about four hours,” he said. “Really, it was hard to get them to come inside.”