Nanaimo Curling Club finds a solution for broken chiller with a promising start to the season
Weinreich said now that a solution has been found, the stress and fear that the season may be affected is all gone. Photo: Lauryn Mackenzie / CHLY 101.7fm.
It has been a couple of busy months for Tom Weinreich, current president of the Nanaimo Curling Club, but now fears of a broken chiller affecting the start of the season are no more.
Back in June, CHLY first reported about the Nanaimo Curling Club’s 13-year-old broken chiller. The chiller is an integral machine that cools the concrete slabs which forms the ice that they play on. Without a chiller, the club could curl.
Although this problem was found at the beginning of the off-season, club members feared that if a solution was not found soon, it would affect the start of the new season.
Back in June, Weinreich told CHLY they were looking at a couple of solutions: to purchase a whole new chiller or to replace the broken parts in their existing unit. These were both costly solutions that the club did not have the money for.
On June 19, Weinreich spoke as a delegate at the City of Nanaimo’s Finance and Audit Committee meeting to see what the city could do to help support the club. The club also started fundraising money, by offering its more than 450 members the option to purchase a 10-year interest-free debenture.
Shortly after CHLY spoke with Weinreich, the Burnaby Lake Arena reached out to the curling club offering to sell them a refurbished plate and frame chiller. The cost of the refurbished chiller came to $156,450, cheaper than a new machine at the estimated price of $235,600. The refurbished chiller was the best option for the club.
From there, Weinreich worked with the City of Nanaimo. At their July 22 council meeting, mayor and council voted to provide a grant of $67,950 to the Nanaimo Curling Club to purchase the new chiller funded by the Strategic Infrastructure Reserve Fund.
To overcome the remaining gap in funding, the curling club was able to raise $88,500 through debentures sold to members. CHLY attended a Nanaimo Curling Club meeting on July 31, where members approved the issuance of the debentures to replace the existing chiller.
Weinreich spoke with CHLY about the next steps for the club now that all the finances have been figured out. He said the new refurbished plate and frame chiller will be more efficient than their last shell and tube chiller.
“This chiller had been used for seven years previously, which isn't long in the lifetime of a chiller of that particular type which is called a plate and frame,” Weinreich said. “The insides are all titanium, so there's never going to be any issues with the brine corroding the interior of the chiller.”
He said the only maintenance issue that will come with the new chiller will be replacing the gaskets every 10 years.
“So basically no corrosion at all between the brine and the titanium, so there are no issues,” he said. “With the old chiller, we did have carbon steel tubes in it and that was very reactionary with a brine, as we found out, we only got 13 years out of that chiller, and we should have gotten a lot more out of that.”
He said the City was very receptive to hearing from him about the need to get a new chiller and he is very appreciative of the funding the City was able to give them. Weinreich also said it is great to see all curling club members come out and support the purchase of the new chiller.
“I mean, curlers aren't really rich people, but some people I know, they're maybe struggling or they don't have as much money and they stepped up and put what they could into the kitty and that felt really good–really nice,” he said.
He said the next steps are now bringing the new chiller over to Nanaimo and removing the old unit at the end of August. He said the process to get the new one running will take about two weeks.
“So we'll be up and running the ice as soon as the chillers job is finished, we'll be able to make ice immediately–knock on wood. Our season will not be affected,” he said.
He said now that a solution has been found the stress and fear that the season may be affected is all gone.
“It's going very, very well at the moment. We've got lots of enthusiasm back in the club. Everybody's excited about cooler weather and curling,” he said. “Hopefully, we get lots of new curlers out this year.”
Janice Ainsworth is a long-time curler who only started curling with the Nanaimo Curling Club when she moved to the city four years ago. She said it was important when she moved to Nanaimo to join the local curling club as soon as possible.
“So it was a really great way for me when I came to a new city to find people and to find friendships and community is the very first thing I did when I got when I moved to Nanaimo was join the curling club,” Ainsworth said.
She said after a year with the Nanaimo Curling Club she joined the board and works on the fundraising team.
Ainsworth said now the main focus is fundraising the money to pay back those who purchased debentures.
To do so, the club is holding a garage sale on September 8, as well as an adult novice curling academy with retired two-time Olympic medalist curler Kevin Martin from October 19 to 20. Martin has won silver at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and gold at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
The academy is a two-day event with technique sessions run by Martin for novice adult curlers. There will also be a “4 end” game with Kevin Martin playing the Nanaimo Curling Club Lottery Team. There will also be a burger and beer after the game.
“We expect that it will raise $10,000 to $15,000, so it's a really big event,” Ainsworth said. “We're pretty excited about that. We have to pay back the $88,000 that we bought from the members.”
She said with the aging building they are always fundraising for repairs, but when the chiller broke, it paused those efforts to focus on getting a new chiller.
“We weren't going to curl, and even if we were going to curl, it might not be until January,” she said. “For me personally, because I had already booked this Kevin Martin event, I was like, ‘oh my gosh,’ because that's major fundraising, and it was like really fortunate just for us to be able to get him. We were looking at growing our community, and then all of a sudden, we might not be able to curl”
She said it is a relief to see the community come together to make the sport of curling continue in Nanaimo
The curling season is still set to start in October and sign-up is happening on the Nanaimo Curling Club website.
Funding Note: This story was produced with funding support from the Local Journalism Initiative, administered by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.