‘Wash and brush up’ Aquatrax style for Swansea University

Louise Prettymanin Synthetics

Aquatrax at Swansea
The International Sports Village at Swansea University is home to premier indoor and outdoor facilities, including two all-weather Astro surfaces, natural turf pitches, tennis courts, 50m swimming pool, sports hall and gym.

The gem of the outdoor facilities is the Class A, International Standard 8-lane athletics track that hosts the university's athletes, external community and athletics clubs as well as top-level sporting events. Continuing their relationship, Replay Maintenance recently carried out their unique Aquatrax® process on the track, to bring it back to an 'as new' condition.

Athletics Facilities Manager, Andrew Griffiths, is supported by a team of grounds staff who help in the maintenance of both the natural and artificial surfaces on the site. "Our in-house team are great at staying on top of the general maintenance of the facilities but a few years ago we decided to bring in a specialist company to deep clean the athletics surface." Andrew spoke to a few local tracks as well as the facilities team at the Alexandra Stadium in Birmingham, and after hearing good things about Replay, called them in. "Our track is in quite a leafy area so the debris from the trees, as well as its daily usage means it does get quite dirty. We aim to give the track a deep clean every two years. Replay's visit in March was the third time they've cleaned it with the Aquatrax® unit."

Aquatrax® is a unique process, combining pressure washing and vacuum extraction. The machine applies pressure water jets to dislodge the dirt before a vacuum extraction system removes the dirty water to a tank on the machine leaving a clean surface, free of contaminants. First developed for the maintenance of polymeric athletics tracks, it has since been adapted to clean dirt and algal growth from unfilled or water-based synthetic pitches.

Replay have used the Aquatrax® machine on the two water-based Astro pitches at Swansea University, most recently in November 2015, when Andrew commented, "Each pitch took two and a half days to clean and it was 4 days to transform the track and all ancillary areas such as the long jump approach and pole vault run-up. Having worked with Replay for a few years now we know we're going to get good quality results. The work they do makes a significant difference to the look and performance of our facility, it looks like a new track again!"