Concrete Problems

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Is Concrete Surfacing the Right Choice for Splash Pads?

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Using concrete as the surface for an aquatic play area is like building a house, putting down plywood and calling it a home. Sure, it functions, but it’s not going to be comfortable or add any design value. And that’s the reality of concrete. It functions fine as a foundation, but is that all we want out of surfacing?

Before: Concrete
After: Life Floor

Life Floor Activates the Entire Splash Pad

At Life Floor, we believe safety surfacing dramatically improves the user experience. It completes the immersive experience you’ve planned and budgeted for, combining safety, playfulness, and utility all in one. In fact, because of the way Life Floor performs with water, it’s actually an additional play feature that activates the entire splash pad.

Child standing on a custom Life Floor surfboard Inlay

The Surface is a Canvas for Play

Life Floor is a feature because it encourages different kinds of play. The entire splash zone is energized when Life Floor is the surface. Kids cartwheel, jump, somersault, crawl, and tumble their way through spray features. In other words, users play in more ways with Life Floor. By equipping the surface for play, designers can engage 90% more of the aquatic facility.

Child jumping over a spray jet on a splash pad.

Investing in Safety and Play Value

The added safety and play benefits of Life Floor are a worthwhile investment. Explore some of the ways we’ve transformed facilities and see what our customers have to say about Life Floor.

Historically, aquatic surfacing has been disastrous. Everything has failed. But with Life Floor, that’s all changed. You can now specify durable surfacing that doubles as a feature. Life Floor's performance and durability have been third-party tested through NSF, which is why we can confidently say we are the only aquatic safety surface that does exactly what it should do.

Want to learn about how our tiles are third-party tested for durability?
Read about how we met the criteria for NSF Standard 50:26 here.

HAVE A PROJECT THAT NEEDS LIFE FLOOR?

Contact us below and tell us about your project. Our Studio Team provides custom design concepts free of charge. We look forward to designing with you soon!

Sugarworld Adventure Park: Surface Design that Lasts

“We are really pleased with the way Life Floor has immediately transformed the look of Sugarworld,” Said Dan Stanford the Capital Works Project Manager for the Cairns Regional Council, “We also really love how our guests enjoy playing on it.”

Shaping Up Design at Grapevine: Our Answer to a Burning Question

Pleasant Glade Pool Deck in Grapevine, TX

The City of Grapevine, Texas is home to an aquatics program carefully curated to engage the community throughout the hot summer season. Between the waterpark, indoor recreation center, outdoor family pool, and splash pads, the award-winning facilities keep 54,000 citizens cool and active. The city’s morning and evening swim lessons, lap pool, and obstacle course are especially well known and loved by community members. However, with the Texas sun heating up the concrete deck to dangerous temperatures, the city knew it had to resurface the entryway.  

“In our entryway, we had no shade protection, so by 4 pm that concrete was 130-140 degrees at least.”
— Hunter Hardeman, Aquatic Supervisor of the Pleasant Glade Pool

Grapevine chose Life Floor because of the tile’s unique ability to dissipate heat underfoot. Unlike concrete, Life Floor tiles do not absorb heat, which is why the tiles feel comfortable to walk on in the summer sun.

Choosing a modern design in rectangles, the entryway now simulates a river flowing into the pool entrance, without the added cost of cutting curves into the tiles. With this affordable design solution, the floor is now a feature instead of a hot problem.

Pleasant Glade Pool Deck in Grapevine, TX
“We have really enjoyed Life Floor. It has definitely made our deck that used to be so hot much better to walk on. It’s great.”
— Hardeman

Parr Park Sprayground has experienced similar heat issues on its concrete splash pad. Using Cool Deck, the City of Grapevine tried to mitigate the hot surface, which ultimately lead to a slippery surface. The city approached Life Floor to solve the slippery, hot surfacing problems in combination with creating a completely new and unique design. It was the perfect timing. The Life Floor Studio had just finalized our newest Hexagon shape. 

Parr Park in Grapevine, TX
Parr Park in Grapevine, TX
Parr Park in Grapevine, TX
“We’ve been really excited about adding hexagon tiles to our product line-up because they offer a completely different visual effect than what we’ve been getting from our square, rectangle, and triangle patterns. The hexagon can be seen as more modern or even more visually interesting to a lot of people. It also interlocks in a more radial way than our other shapes have. When arranged with enough variety of color, hexagons can create a really interesting mottled effect across a surface. For this reason, we think this shape has the potential to really enhance municipal splash pads without adding additional cost for custom-cut designs. Parr Park had a pre-existing splash pad with a swooping shape so I thought it would be fun to create a design that followed those curves. I really liked that the mix of cool tones could create a vibrant, futuristic feel that departs from so many of our other designs that often have nature-based or beach themes.”
— Kelsi Goss, Studio Director for Life Floor

A big thank you to the City of Grapevine for being our Hexagon pioneer! 

Installation by Preferred Installation Partner, Inside Edge.


Play Value Part 3: Where Does Design Fit In?

Safety surfacing, by nature, allows kids to play on splash pads the way they want to play. But there’s more to the conversation than just facilitating play. How can safety surfacing elevate experiences by encouraging and inviting new kinds of play opportunities? How can safety surfaces by design create a more dynamic play space?

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Play Value Part 2: A Canary Test

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We’re back to our discussion about spray parks and play value! We’re going to start where we left off and dive deeper into the issue of spray park design, specifically surface design.

In Lisa J Lewis’s 2005 paper “Role of Splash Parks in Outdoor Public Recreation,” Lewis ends  with her overall recommendations about how splash pads in general should be designed. She anchors this conclusion with the following:

Spray Parks and Play Value Part 1

There are many practical reasons to love spray parks. They’re less expensive to build and maintain than pools, they’re often free to the community, and they serve as a place to connect with neighbors and new families. Of course the main users of splash pads, kids, love them for a very obvious reason: they’re fun!

But how do you measure how fun a splash pad is?

A Blistering Safety Issue

Sizzle. The sound you’d like to avoid when wet feet touch hot concrete. If you’ve ever been to an outdoor aquatic facility in the summer, this problem is likely a sore subject. One of the most common complaints brought to us by operators is the issue of hot surfaces throughout outdoor facilities, specifically on pool decks, stair towers, and walkways. It comes as little surprise then to learn that concrete can reach temperatures hovering around 120°F, while rubberized surfaces can easily reach temperatures above 140°F. In one recent study, a rubberized surface was reported to be 170°F (X).

Aquatic Concussions: Anecdotal Problem or Widespread Issue?

The Brain Injury Association of America (BIAA) uses March as part of their awareness campaign to educate and expand the conversation around traumatic brain injuries, including helping the general public understand both the incidence rate of brain injuries, as well as how to support the brain community and their families.

Filtering Through Splash Pad Concerns

There are likely somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 splash pads in the U.S., a number that is growing by an estimated 5-10 percent per year. A few seasons ago, we wrote a blog about how to design a splash pad and the best ways to make sure your splash pad, splash deck, spray ground, aquatic play pad, rain deck, spray deck, spray pad, spray pool, and spray zone stands out above the crowd.

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Apples to Aggregate

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While there are many lessons that can be learned from the Red Delicious, the lesson we’d like to focus on is when a product becomes the default for the wrong reasons. The best selling fruit should not, as The Atlantic put it, become “the largest compost-maker in the country.” [x] (My family used to go apple picking in the Hudson Valley every year. We never touched the things. Go for Empires or Honeycrisps. - Ed.)

Splash Pads Need Safety Surfaces: Part 4

The safety revolution that transformed dry playgrounds is long overdue for splash pads. We believe that creating similar standards for splash pads will reduce injuries and provide a significant benefit to public health, thereby creating a safer future for aquatic recreation, for our families, and for our communities.

Splash Pads Need Safety Surfacing: Part 3

From the beginning, splash pads have often been built adjacent to, or even on top of, public pools and wading pools, and so they have traditionally maintained the hard concrete “floors” of these pools. However, the practice of treating splash pads as a literal extension of the pool category is both inaccurate and dangerous. Even if splash pads began in the pool and fountain space, they have developed beyond those categories and now require a different set of safety regulations.

Splash Pads Need Safety Surfacing: Part 2

Playgrounds and splash pads are used in remarkably similar ways: children climb, run, and jump as they interact with play features. The major difference between splash pads and dry playgrounds is the presence of water. In other words, splash pads are simply playgrounds + water. As a result, they share some similar safety concerns.

Splash Pads: The Non-pools

Ultimately, splash pad safety standards should be determined not by superficial similarities to pools, but by considering how people actually use splash pads. Basically, kids treat splash pads as playgrounds. They walk, run, and jump on splash pads, they play tag on splash pads. The primary mode of movement around a splash pad is definitely not swimming, and the primary risk is a slip-and-fall injury, not drowning.

Splash Pads: What's in a name?

Here at Life Floor, we think a lot about splash pads. We design and manufacture splash pad surfacing; we play on splash pads, too, and sometimes, we even invite our kids. As our involvement in aquatics has grown, we began to notice something unusual: no one seems entirely sure what to call these things. There’s actually a pretty wide variety of names, including: splash pad, splash deck, spray ground, aquatic play pad, rain deck, spray deck, spray pad, spray pool, and spray zone.

Five Reasons To Ditch Concrete Pool Decks

Without cement, the world would be a very different place. The Romans used it to build and maintain their empire, it remains the material of choice for deep footings or foundations, and it simply can’t be beat if you’re building a hydroelectric dam. However, if you’re installing a pool and not, say, recreating the Pantheon in your backyard, there are better options available. Here are five good reasons to pick something other than concrete or cement for your in-ground pool deck.

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10 Tips and Tricks to Help You Design the Best Pool For Your Space

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Choose a pool that fits your personality and lifestyle: Perhaps you’d rather have a winding, lazy river in which to relax, or perhaps you'd rather spend your pool-time swimming laps. Infinity pools are especially beautiful and can compliment waterfront views, while adding slides or diving boards make your pool more entertaining and kid-friendly. In general, think about how you would like to use your pool and how you will realistically use it the most, and try to combine the two to fit your lifestyle.