About Us

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Engineering - How it all Works!
"Clean, Green, Sustainable"

The site location, which is tucked under the southern side of Mount John on the shores of Lake Tekapo, has long been the home of ice rinks. As ECNZ (Electricity Corporation New Zealand) raised lake levels through the seventies and eighties, the old rinks submerged and new natural rinks were created at the present site, some one hundred feet higher than the existing rinks. Two natural springs filled the rinks every autumn and froze as the temperatures dropped and the suns aperture changed as winter approached. These two alpine springs are the same water source that fill our new hot pools and are subsequently heated by our energy efficient heat recovery system.
With climate change and warming temperatures, the reliability of forming natural ice has become difficult. Hence the need for a refrigeration plant to artificially freeze an ice surface. Winter Park's new artificial outdoor ice surface will be powered by a five hundred kilowatt Hall Screw Compressor manufactured by J & E Hall International. The refrigeration plant will provide plenty of cooling capacity to freeze the ice surface. As a by product of the freezing process, the refrigeration plant produces a lot of heat. In Fact at full operating capacity, the refrigeration plant will produce in excess of six hundred kilowatts of heating capacity. Instead of letting this heat energy escape into the air unused, we will use this energy, by way of heat exchangers, to heat our hot pools and associated buildings.
Over the summer months when the ice rink is not operational, we still need heat for our hot springs. The refrigeration plant has been designed so that it can cool or refrigerate any medium. Our medium for heating over the summer months will be to utilise the lake water that is only five hundred metres away, pump it through the refrigeration plant, therefore cooling it and throwing it back out into the lake and creating heat for our hot springs from this process.
As a result of this sustainable and environmentally friendly energy use, we are getting an energy efficiency of 1:4. So for every kilowatt we put into pumping water through our refrigeration plant (or cooling Glycol for the ice rink) we get a whooping 4 kilowatts back, sometimes more. Great technology and sustainability utilizing energy to its fullest, and all for your pleasure!!

Thats not all! Our very modern pool plant has the latest environmentally friendly filtering system using a giant sand filter and a minimal chlorine based WAPOTECH dosing system. This means our filtering process requires no substances (Such as DE or Diatimacious Earth as many pools use) that leave any toxic residue to deal with. Secondly, our WAPOTECH water cleansing agents allow us to use minimal chlorine to attain fresh, clear and safe spring water for our bathers.

Much of the rock and timber extracted from our site has been used for retaining and building purposes. The main building as seen below has been clad in douglas fur timber cut and milled on site. All the rockwork (retaining walls, feature rocks, landscaping etc) has been done from rocks extracted from our site. Alpine Springs & Winter Park is truely a unique destination offering a unique mix of recreation and relaxation with exeptional sustainablilty.

View from Ice Skating Rink

MORE... in detail!

When winter comes to a close and the ice rink shuts down, the same plant will pump water out of Lake Tekapo at a core temperature of eight degrees Celsius, cool it through the refrigeration unit by two or three degrees and pump the water straight back into the lake. However the difference between eight degrees and five or six degrees is energy, and more importantly, heat energy. The energy or heat extracted from cooling the lake water will be used to heat the hot pools over the summer months. Once again, a very efficient and clean use of the surrounding environments energy all for your pleasure! Essentially, this is a heat pump working in reverse. We will need to pump nearly two hundred and fifty litres of lake water a minute to attain this heat requirements.

To make snow, Winter Park has purchased an automated 'super pole cat' snow making system capable of covering our 100 metre by 50 metre slope in twelve hours of snow making. We know from past records we have 250 to 300 hours of snow making temps. The water taken from the lake for heating the pools will also go via our snowmaking system - the cooler the water, the easier it is to make snow.