Synthetic Tennis Courts Pitchcare Classifieds
Synthetic tennis courts - dealing with migration!
Synthetic tennis courts are like all other non-natural surfaces - they need maintenance - but are generally perceived not to. Nick Harris from Replay Maintenance reviews the different types of synthetic tennis courts and their maintenance requirements
A common problem with carpeted tennis courts is that the infill, which is there to protect the carpet, often gets migrated out of the surface, especially in the service line/base line areas. If and when this happens, the carpet will tend to wear more quickly.
The same areas that you find wear out on a painted hard court are the same areas on a carpeted court that tend to get worn or damaged - potentially to rip or tear. It is important to keep the sand levels at the right height within the carpet, which is done by regularly brushing to get the sand back into the high-wear areas.
Surfaces will build up a lot of airborne dust, detritus and debris off players’ footwear. This will make its way into the infill and start to seal the carpet.
As with hard courts, debris that is dropped will sit on top of the sand and start to block up the drainage of the carpet, resulting in problems such as silt, dirt and flooding. To counteract this, our ‘Rejuvenation’ process uses compressed air to take out the existing sand and all contaminates, and redress the carpet with new sand.
This has widely been recognised as the classleading method for restoring tennis courts, with both small and large extraction machines available depending on the access and size of facility.
Depending on how good a facility’s preventative maintenance programme has been, this process may only need to be done from year seven onwards. This takes roughly a day per court, but helps to extend the life of the court by a further five years.
Part of the preventative maintenance programme could be our ‘Revive’ procedure that cleans the sand infill regularly. A high demand for this service comes from tennis clubs that generally have multiple courts and are closed members clubs, as
148 I PC AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2017
they don’t always have dedicated groundstaff to look after them, and it often falls to committee members and volunteers to do the work.
The process is a more intense clean, compared to what what the members can achieve themselves, and keeps the infill clean and the surface clear of debris.
As a general point, particular attention should be paid to the perimeter area and the net lines, as this is where problems start to take hold - these areas don’t get played on and don’t get worn, so they stagnate, allowing moss and algae to quickly grow and spread.
When the surface becomes non-porous, the rain can’t drain through and begins to lift out the lighter dust and debris from the infill. This then travels around the court and is deposited in lower areas (called silt puddles) on the court.
One club had a lot of surface silt that had been flushed out of the carpet, moved around to the lower areas and left hazardous, slippery areas. A couple of the courts became unplayable because they were so slippery and dangerous. The carpet itself was in good condition; plenty of pile depth left; good construction and no seam failure, but the contamination in the sand was the issue.
The remedial action was to run the Rejuvenation process, using compressed air to extract the sand and redress with clean sand. To prevent this happening in the future, the club was encouraged to ‘up’ their routine maintenance, both in-house and external.
This article has been précised from an original by Nick Harris of Replay Maintenance.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164
