Best synthetic ice for spinning at home

[robot]

Does anyone have any recommendations for which brand of synthetic ice is best for spinning at home ? I'm willing to save up for professional tiles and build my rink piece by piece if necessary, and honestly don't care how much time and money it's going to cost if it allows me to keep skating everyday. I already know that a spinner or inlines is an option, but I've already tried that and feel that synthetic ice is really my last chance at happiness if I have to quit skating or cut back significantly due to scheduling conflicts. Although dull blades are no fun, I'm great with a honing stone and will make it work.

Hopefully I can keep skating on ice and it won't come to that, but .......

 

[Query]

Ice skating is normally done on real water ice a few degrees below the freezing point for a simple reason - it is quite possibly the lowest friction surface known to humans, by a huge factor. (Not counting superfluids, which only occur at temperatures too low to be practical and safe.) Nothing practical can compare.

Most of us who have skated on both real ice and artificial (fake) ice probably think there is no such thing as good artificial ice

At a rough guess, the friction you encounter on fake ice is more than an order of magnitude greater. It wore out my edges in about 20 minutes at least as much as 40 hours of skating on real ice would have done. (Which means that the most expensive part of skating on artificial ice might be sharpening and replacing blades! But at least artificial ice is good for developing muscle strength.)

And none of the spinners and spin trainers are all that similar either. I guess you can practice keeping your balance - provided you place your foot slightly off center, to sort of simulate the effect of moving on an edge around that circle. But it really isn't the same thing. Be careful - you will take a fair number of falls on spinners.

The lowest friction option I can find.: spinning on a slippery waxed kitchen floor while wearing thin nylon socks but that's not the same thing either. But that makes me spin in place, on the whole ball of my foot, whereas spinning on the ice is done while following a circle, on edge. But I'm not a great spinner. Maybe some other people here can give you better options.

Now if someone could figure out how to set up a tiny little mini rink in one's home...

Spinning on inline skates, especially if you get PicSkate frames to sort of simulate toepicks, is a little similar - but once again, the frictional resistance to turning and spinning is much, much higher on inlines than on real ice.

Maybe the best option would be to take a vacation to a place with a real ice rink, and take some lessons...

 

[robot]

Which specific brands of synthetic ice have you tried? And how well maintained was the synthetic surface? Was it a home rink or public rink?

I've never skated on synthetic ice before, so currently I'm teetering back and forth between glice and polyglide.

Also, I do still have access to an actual ice rink, I just want to look into synthetic ice for the flexibility it would give me schedule wise.

And like I've said in my post- I've already tried spinners and inline figure skates. Safe to say I'm not really a fan.

 

[NanaPat]

There have been discussions of synthetic ice on the forum in the past. Search the forums and you will find links to them. To search, click on the magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner of the page, enter synthetic in the search box and click "search titles only".

One of those threads is here

 

[Query]

In all fairness, the synthetic ice I tried was a fair number of years ago. Maybe it has improved.

And at the time, a coach at the synthetic ice rink told me it was good for beginners - they fell less often, because it wasn't as slippery.

She also told me that skating on synthetic ice was good strength training, for the same reason.

But if you are trying to work within a low budget, and save time, the number of times you will need to resharpen and replace your blades could be a real problem. Getting someone to resharpen blades costs $5 - $20, depending on their skill - and they don't do a very good job at the low end of that. And even very cheap figure skating blades are likely to cost you $125-150, and will last you about 30 sharpenings, if the sharpener is pretty good. At a rough estimate, even if you go fully an hour of skating between sharpenings (by which time they will be quite dull, if my old generation synthetic ice experience is typical), each hour of skating will cost you ($5 to $20) + ($125 to $150)/30, which comes to about $9.17 - $25 per hour, as well as the time and cost of driving to the person who does the sharpening. That's a fair bit of money and drive time. If you have to drive 50 miles each way to the person who does the sharpening, and the total cost of driving is about $0.60/mile, all vehicle costs included, that's another $60 / skating hour (as well as a couple hours driving) - though the cost varies a lot, depending on the type of vehicle, how it is maintained, depreciation, how far you have to drive, etc. So that hour of skating on synthetic ice could cost you a lot of time and money.

But, like I said, maybe modern synthetic ices have improved a little.

In contrast, skating on real ice you might resharpen every 40-120 hours (it actually varies a lot more than that) - but you have to include the costs of driving to the rink.

A lot of people don't like they way I calculate costs, because they think it can't possibly be that expensive. So you are welcome to make your own estimates. And it is true that if you don't skate, you might spend the time having fun some other way, that might be expensive too, if you include all the costs.