Synthetic Ice Hard Truth Revealed

April 23, 2026

Welcome to SmartRink’s new blog page. In being consistent with our promise to provide interested consumers with the most insightful and informative industry information on synthetic ice we decided to start this blog. I often chuckle when I read some of the information out there on synthetic ice. The industry needs to wake up really and get real about what synthetic ice can and cannot do. It is often “oversold” frankly. I’m saying this – and I firmly believe we have the very best synthetic ice rink products available in the world today! But this is simply part of our commitment to providing customers real expectations about synthetic ice. For starters synthetic ice is not as good as real ice - and it likely never will be. I was recently talking to a professional figure skater who used our product for a show in Ottawa. Although she loved our product and appeared to perform flawlessly, she’d be the first to say that it’s not the same a real ice. This got me thinking about how we are marketing the product. I took a quick look around and here are some of the comments I borrowed from other competitors websites: “test have shown that it requires only 10-15% more effort than real ice”“X has made it possible to skate on a true “skate-like-ice” surface“ It delivers incredible performance by offering unequaled gliding capabilities and uninhibited skill execution.”“feels just like real ice”

My personal favorite though has to be…” X has put considerable efforts into researching the morphology of skating and hockey moves and adapted X unique synthetic ice product formula to respond identically to conventional ice.”I mean seriously!? “identically to real ice”??

This is all great stuff and if I was a consumer I’d be very excited about it as well! The reality though is that synthetic ice is not identical to real ice - and most are not even close to a real ice experience. I would go so far as to say that there is nothing that can not be done on a Smartrink synthetic ice surface that can be done on real ice from what I’ve seen first hand. Even so it's just not real ice, but for now it's a close as we can get.

Have fun, keep skating!