15-09-2023

Lance head replacement: A big impact at low cost.

With the new challenges faced by ski resort operators, in terms of energy costs, changing weather conditions as well as expectations of guests for optimum snow quality, improving the efficiency of existing snowmaking installations is a key success factor.

However, what’s easy with new snowmaking projects, which benefits from the start from the latest snow gun technologies, can be viewed as more difficult for ski resorts with large existing fleets of snow guns, particularly with lances, some of which being of older generations.

With many years of extensive research and development, as well as strong engineering skills, TechnoAlpin is able to bring a technical solution to ski resorts facing this situation: the lance head replacement. Indeed, with a limited investment requirement, this is possible to easily upgrade lances, by simply changing the heads of the snow guns.

Snow jet from the nozzle head of a TechnoAlpin snow lance against a blue sky

Keeping the same lance pipe and snow pit valve, it is only necessary to replace the head of the lance, by a new head. For instance, Rubis Classic, A30 and A9 lance heads can be replaced by Rubis Evo, TL4 (standard version) or V3 heads. Therefore, with a reduced investment, this will yield a significant increase in terms of production efficiency and optimization of the resource management. This brings immediate benefits to the ski resort operators: making more snow across all the temperature ranges, increased snow quality on the slopes and of course a greater energy efficiency and lower carbon footprint! And because TechnoAlpin equipment is used for optimisation, the manufacturer's warranties and production performance are preserved.

This year alone, over 1200 heads of older generation lances have been replaced on many snowmaking systems worldwide. This operation allows ski resort operators to benefit from today’s modern snowmaking technologies by TechnoAlpin, while keeping investment costs in line.