Best Practices for Maintaining Your Arena Surface
Written by Combi-Ride
From the casual rider’s personal ménage to a professional show jumper’s indoor arena, the surface is critically important. Alongside a quality surface is the maintenance needed to keep it consistently level. A quality surface and its maintenance go together like a horse and carriage.
Different Horse Arena Fibre Surfaces
From ready-to-use surface solutions through to emulsion treatments, there are horse arena surfaces and solutions to suit any budget and application. You can choose from:
- Equestrian Silica Sand and Fibre surface
- Stabiliser fibre and equestrian-grade silica sand
- Silica sand equestrian surface
- Horse arena fibre top ups - ideal for new or sand-based surfaces
- Wax sand and fibre surface
Daily Arena Maintenance Tips
Horse arena maintenance will help your surface remain in good working condition for many years. Simply picking up droppings and fallen leaves and carrying out regular maintenance can add years onto your surface.
For an arena surface to remain at its optimum for your horses, you need regular levelling.
How often your surface needs levelling depends on the frequency of usage, climate, surface type, type of riding and more. However, signs your surface needs releveling are:
- A deep track around the outside of the arena which needs re-distributing and levelling
- Riding corners starting to be loose and unstable
Arena Levelling Procedures
The main purposes of arena levelling are:
- To ensure surface components and materials are mixed together
- To break up a compacted surface
- To promote consistent moisture retention and reduce dust content.
- To redistribute the surface and ensure there are no shallow areas, raised edges or holes.
An arena leveller that has a built-in adjustable side blade that automatically pulls in the materials from the kickboards is much easier than manually going around with a rake!
Seasonal Arena Maintenance Strategies
Your maintenance routine should be tailored for different weather conditions. Each season has different requirements:
Winter Maintenance
- Prevent freezing with regular levelling can help prevent the arena surface from freezing and becoming too hard
Summer Maintenance
- Adding water to the surface will help to control dust and maintain correct moisture levels
- Regular levelling to ensure even surface distribution and to prevent compaction from heavy use
Spring and Autumn Maintenance
- Ensure proper drainage to prevent waterlogging in rainy seasons.
- Frequent levelling to maintain a flat, even surface and manage compaction from increased moisture
Equipment for Maintaining Your Arena Surface
You may still see arena surfaces being levelled by a person pulling an old gate or chain harrow. This method may seem cost-effective but in the long term, it’s quite the opposite! There are specialist tools that do a much better job:
Our levellers are a specialised tool that features spring tines designed to break up compaction, mix and level materials. All our levellers come with adjustable settings to control the tine depths and integral side blade for perimeter grading.
Get in touch with ArenaMate®
Having the best equestrian surface involves crucial attention to the surface type and regular upkeep to ensure safety and performance.