Equipment for water parks

A commercial water park is a throughput business. Every attraction has to justify its footprint in riders per hour, and the mix has to hold a family group on site for a full day rather than sending them home after two hours.

Building the mix

A park that works usually has four things, and skipping any one of them shows in dwell time.

• An anchor. A wave pool or lazy river. High capacity, universal appeal, and the thing that absorbs the crowd at peak.
• A headline thrill. A funnel slide or drop slide. It sells tickets and it is what appears in your marketing whether or not most visitors ride it.
• Volume throughput. Racing slides and spirals. These clear the queues that the headline attraction generates.
• A children's zone. A large play house or structured splash area. This is what determines whether the family stays until closing.

Throughput as a design constraint

Attraction capacity, not plot area, is what limits a park's admissions. A drop slide with a single rider at a time cannot absorb the crowd a wave pool releases. Racing slides scale almost linearly with lane count, which is why they earn their frontage.

Throughput figures for our range are being confirmed with the manufacturer and are issued with quotations rather than published as estimates.

Sharing a tower

The most consequential cost decision available. One tower, one staircase, one set of foundations, three or four flumes. An open spiral, an enclosed spiral and a drop slide from one 12 m platform gives three genuinely different rides for far less than three separate structures, and concentrates queueing where you can manage it.

Plant is not an afterthought

Total connected load across a park's attractions is substantial — a single funnel slide is 90 kW, a wave system 90 kW per set, a lazy river 90 kW. Electrical supply, pump sizing, filtration and balance tank capacity need designing against the whole schedule, not attraction by attraction. Your MEP consultant needs our flow and power figures early.

Phasing

Most successful regional parks phase. Open with an anchor, a children's zone and two or three slides; add the headline thrill in year two once revenue is proven. It reduces the capital at risk and gives you a reason to remarket the park.

Phasing works only if it is designed in from the start — civil works, plant capacity and circulation for phase two need to exist before phase one opens.

Our scope

We supply equipment. Pools, channels, decks, foundations, plant rooms and installation are carried out by your contractor. We provide the dimensional, power and flow package your design team needs to build around the equipment. For a flagship destination park with a nine-figure budget, engage a major manufacturer directly — that is the right call at that scale.

Related

• Wave pool systems
• Lazy river systems
• Water slides