WITH just two more sleeps until the Bathurst Winter Festival, the Western Advocate went behind the scenes to find out more about the ice rink.
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The McDonald’s Bathurst Ice Rink is bigger than last year, and almost ready for the festival to kick off on Saturday morning.
Ice Rinks Australia’s Jamie Stoller shared some facts about the huge ice rink.
“It’s 540 square metres, so 30 metres by 18 metres of ice surface, which is slightly bigger than last year,” he said.
There is 30,000 litres of water in the rink that is being kept frozen by 10,000 metres (10 kilometres) of aluminium piping that lies underneath the ice.
“It took about 12 hours to get it ready to be freezing, that’s laying all the pipes, and putting up all the boards and pumping all the refrigerant through the system,” Mr Stoller said.
“The refrigerant running through is about minus 12 [degrees] and that sort of fluctuates throughout the day depending on if there’s direct sunlight or wind or other things like that.
“It’s around 48 hours of freezing and gradually adding the water to build the level up so we’ve got the nice skating surface which ended up being around 75 millimetres high.”
The ice rink will hold 150 skaters to ensure people have enough space to skate.
- Purchase your tickets to ice skate
- Share your photos from this year’s festival by using the hashtag #BathurstWinterFestival and posting them to the Western Advocate on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.