The City of Kamloops says long-term, it plans to have zambonis at every local rink flooding ice with cold water.

Civic facilities manager Jeff Putnam says in 2019 the city saved just under $48,900 from doing so, and says the energy saved is the equivalent of powering 20 homes.

He says those numbers were with four of the six local sheets using cold water to flood the ice, which were Brock Arena, the two ice sheets at the MacArthur Island Sports Centre and Valleyview Arena. The rinks still used warm water to flood ice are Memorial Arena and Sandman Centre.

“For sure we’re going to be at five in 2020. We’ll need to sit down with the Western Hockey League and the Kamloops Blazers and make sure they’re important partners as we move forward to converting Sandman Centre. We haven’t set a date or a time for that, but we would like to do it at Sandman Centre,” Putnam says.

“It is an event building. It’s used for concerts and various things. So that arena is generally warmer inside the arena, and often we go from a hockey event overnight to a full conversion to a rock concert and then a full conversion back to hockey. So there’s a lot of influences on ice quality in the arena compared to the smaller ones.”

Putnam says only cost to convert to cold water is to decomission hot water lines used to fill zambonis which he says is minimal.