Safe, clean and so quiet: Iqaluit goes electric with new Zamboni

The City of Iqaluit’s newest vehicle has made a quiet entrance into the community — it’s an electric Zamboni, recently delivered by sealift.

“You don’t even know it’s running, it’s that quiet,” Todd Gardner, the city’s facilities manager, said of the new ice cleaner that will be deployed at the Arctic Winter Games Arena.

Those machines typically have a 20-year lifespan and it was time to replace the oldest one, Gardner said. He added the city has two other ice cleaners, one that is 23 years old and another that’s about 13 years old.

The Zambonis get regular maintenance, Gardner said, but it gets challenging when the city has to order parts from down south. The vehicles get a lot of use keeping the arena ice clean and fresh.

“Both arenas are open seven days a week, sometimes until 11 p.m,” Gardner said.

The decision to acquire the new electric Zamboni came down to savings and safety.

It cost approximately $160,000, but by buying an electric vehicle the city should save close to $8,000 a year because it won’t require propane to run, unlike the city’s older ice cleaners.

Avoiding the risk involved in changing a propane tank also makes the new Zamboni safer to use.

“I just hear a lot of good things about going electric over propane,” Gardner said.

Todd Gardner, the City of Iqaluit’s facilities manager, said savings and safety played a role in the decision to go electric for the new Zamboni ice cleaner. (Photo by David Lochead)

For a time last weekend, the ice cleaner at the Arctic Winter Games Arena was out of commission. The same thing happened once or twice last year, Gardner said.

“If anything does break, we try to get it fixed right away. The last thing we want is kids not be able” to go onto the ice.

The new electric Zamboni is currently in storage and will stay there while staff are trained to use it.

After that, it will go to the Arctic Winter Games Arena. Gardner said he has only driven the new Zamboni for about 10 seconds so far, and it was so quiet that he had to check whether it was on.

“There’s no sound, that’s the thing,” he said.

Using an electric vehicle in an Arctic community arena should not be a problem because the Zamboni room is heated, Gardner said. There will also be a charging station for it.

As for the older ice cleaner, Gardner said it will be used to flood the outdoor rinks in front of Nakashuk school and in Apex.

“Now that we have a third [Zamboni], we can spend more time on the outdoor rinks,” he said.

Billy Sikkiniq, one of the city’s Zamboni drivers, said “we have to learn” with the new electric machine. He said he will tell his staff, “don’t be intimidated, it’s just like a regular Zamboni.”

Sikkiniq added it was time to get a new Zamboni, considering one of the city’s other ice cleaners is nearly a quarter-century old.

Gardner said they won’t rush through training, but admitted staff are excited.

“They can’t wait to get on it,” he said. “They can’t wait to get [the Zamboni] going.”