Readers of this blog will know that I’ve written often about Les Quinton, the now former arena manager of the Oilfields Regional Arena in Diamond Valley, AB. Yes, I’ve written about him a lot (for example Two Decades of Energy Efficiencies), but I think about him and the energy efficiencies he implemented while he was there even more often. Come on! That arena had a monthly electric spend of around 20,000 kWh per month. With many rinks using 10 times that number, you’ve got to be impressed (and take a page out of his book for what you can do with your rink). I certainly am. And I’m thankful to Les for sharing what he did with me, so I can tell others.

I called him this morning with something on my mind, and twenty seconds in to the call, I admitted I’d thought about him twice this week. The first time was when I had a call with the commercial program incentives designer for Enbridge Gas in Ontario. He asked me if I knew if municipalities have the ability to set aside the energy incentive money they get. I thought about Les straight away and the Green Fund he set up. In his 26 year tenure at Diamond Valley, he raised over $2,000,000 in grants, so having established a Green Fund was pretty significant. “Green Funds” are becoming more popular — The Town of Caledon in Ontario has one, its Corporate Energy Revolving Fund was set up in 2015, initially as a vehicle for their solar revenues. That was recently featured in a Green Municipal Fund article you can read here. I put that on my list of things to tell Les about because I read this morning in the roundup from the Municipal Information Network that Caledon reported an amazing $5.4 million dollar surplus for 2024. Cadelon is one of my customers for REALice — and both Les and I know how few and far between green funds actually are, so it’s something we tend to celebrate. And Caledon’s surplus is incredible. His reply to that was, “They must be doing something right!”

Doing something right indeed.

Like Les does. Still does, in fact, dabbling in arena consulting from time to time. And fixing PCs. But I digress.

My call was about water. Bad water.

I’ve got a potential customer who says they have “really crappy water” and I’m trying to help them solve that.

Diamond Valley, in the Foothills region just south of Calgary, also has water Les would describe as “crappy”. That crappy water wasn’t just hard, but an ongoing challenge for boiler maintenance. The annual cleaning of the boiler meant digging out 8″ to a foot of scale – and it was an annual task. Once he put the Steam KLEAN S44 in place, the maintenance interval changed from once every year to once every two years. And instead of a bunch of scale to remove, Les says he only had a cup.

I asked him about the magnets because I’ve talked to lots of arena managers about it and most of them say they don’t work.

“Ha!,” he laughs. “They say they don’t work because they’ve never tried it, or if they have tried it and it didn’t work, they haven’t put it in the right place. As for not trying it, Les says, “A lot of people are stuck in their ways.”

I’m going to suggest that this arena manager tries some magnet therapy for his boiler. I can’t say which he should choose — there are quite a lot of choices on the market and I wasn’t able to find the Steam KLEAN S44 when I did a google search, but I’m sure something’s gotta help him with his crappy water!