About the Waterpark
Spanning 120,000 square feet, The Island Waterpark at Showboat hotel and casino is one of the most recent major attractions to hit the historic Atlantic City, New Jersey boardwalk. Opened in July 2023, the waterpark was developed to make Atlantic City, best-known for its gambling and nightlife offerings, a more family-friendly recreation and leisure destination. Designed by leading aquatic design and engineering firm Martin Aquatic, The Island delivers on that effort, featuring a number of exciting and cutting-edge attractions, suitable for both kids and adults. Park highlights include 11 winding water slides, a 500-foot lazy river, and a state-of-the-art surf simulator.
The Application
The waterpark has two mechanical rooms, each housing a vast array of equipment, including pumps, regenerative filter systems, UV systems, water chemistry systems and more. Each mechanical room contains one MCP, responsible for interlocking pumps with water quality systems, maintaining basin water levels, and monitoring sensors and equipment for faults and alarms. The MCPs also integrate with and control the logic underpinning the facility’s distributed network of emergency stop buttons.
In addition to automating and controlling many of the waterpark’s routine functions, the MCPs also provide maintenance teams with a series of dashboards, reflecting a comprehensive real-time view of the health and performance of both equipment rooms.
The park’s two MCPs controllers, installed in equipment rooms at opposite ends of the facility.
SplashBotix MCP Equipment Room Controller
Part Number: 071071C001
The MCP is your pump room’s central command center — it automatically controls water levels, interlocks critical systems, and provides your operations team with real-time insights into the health and performance of your aquatic operations.
Installation and Commissioning
Despite the facility’s sheer volume and diverse mix of attractions, The Island Waterpark was constructed in just eight months – record time for any waterpark, let alone one that size.
The project was able to meet such an impressive development timeline due in large part to the ease with which contractors and park personnel were able to test and commission park attractions using the MCP’s VFD control interface.
In particular, the MCP likely saved contractors several man-days in commissioning the park’s lazy river. Lazy rivers, which rely on the synchronization of as many as 8-10 feature pumps, are notoriously time-consuming to startup. Under normal circumstances, contractors might have spent hours pacing back and forth between the equipment room and the lazy river, incrementally raising the speed of each pump in order to achieve an ideal flow rate.
Using the MCP, however, operators were able to adjust the speed of each pump from a single touch point.
“Given the number of VFDs being used on the [lazy river], it may have taken us a few days to go through all the parameters and make sure everything was set up correctly,” said The Island Waterpark’s Director of Maintenance Dan Jankovits. “Using the MCP, it took us just a few hours.”
Jankovits also pointed out that using the MCP was much easier than having to navigate a conventional push-button VFD interface.
“If you’ve ever had to change the parameters on a VFD,” said Jankovits, “you know they’ve got four sets of arrows and an “enter” button. And basically, you’re hitting the arrows to navigate across multiple screens to eventually get the VFD to a certain point. [With the MCP], it’s all a touch screen and everything is spelled out in plain English right on the screen.”
The MCP’s pump control interface helped reduce the commissioning time on other attractions as well. Waterslides, for instance, were much easier to commission than they might have been otherwise, as Jankovits and his team could precisely dial in the flow of each water slide, rather than having to manually adjust each slide’s flow control valve.
“A lot of these slides require specific flows that you need to get to. So, you have to be able to dial it in and, historically, that’s been done mechanically by tweaking individual valves. Rather than adjusting these valves in the pump room, I can just use the [MCP] to change the hertz on the motor little-by-little to adjust the flow if I need to.”
Operator Experience
Facility Walk-Throughs
Regular equipment monitoring is another challenge aquatic facility operators face, and the team at The Island Waterpark is no exception. Given the facility’s size and breadth of equipment, daily walk-throughs conducted by park personnel can be extremely time-consuming.
The park’s two MCP controllers, however, which provide operators with a comprehensive, real-time view of each equipment room, have helped ensure that the team’s daily walk throughs are highly efficient and effective.
“When I go into these pump rooms, the first thing I do is look at the screen,” said Jankovits. “Then I might see, for example, that one of the [filtration] systems was in pre-coat for too long, so I’ll check on that first to make sure it’s back to operating normally.”
“So, for me”, Jankovits continued, “it really helps prioritize what needs to be done during my walk-throughs and make the best use of my time.”
Sample MCP Slide Basin View
SCADA System
In addition to helping Jankovits prioritize his time, the MCPs also enable him and his team to more quickly identify and respond to potential issues.
One aspect of the MCP that has been critical for Jankovits is the controller’s Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) feature – a running log of key facility events, reflecting everything from administrative actions to device faults and alarms. Designed to help operators monitor for anomalies that may point to larger problems affecting their facility, the MCP’s SCADA revealed a pattern of irregular water fill valve behavior that drew Jankovits’ attention to a possible leak event last Summer.
“[The SCADA system] helped, for example, when we realized pretty quickly last July and into August we were having water issues with one of our attractions,” said Jankovits. “The system allowed us to see how often and when the water fill valve was being opened, so we were able to see over just a few shifts where there might be a leak and where we might be having issues.”
Sample MCP SCADA View
In another instance, the SCADA system drew Jankovits and his team’s attention to a potential issue with an emergency stop switch on one of the park’s water slides.
“We had a problem with one of our slide towers where one of our phone boxes was swinging too far open and hitting the e-stop and shutting down the slide,” said Jankovits. “And you could see in the system just how often that e-stop was being hit. The system prompted us to go and investigate and ultimately figure out what was going on.”
Optimizing Waterpark Operations
In addition to facilitating better walk-throughs and empowering operations with the foresight to address problems before they escalate, the MCP also helps make more technical aspects of the equipment room easier for operators to manage.
According to Jankovits, it can often take years of industry experience to truly understand and become comfortable working with and maintaining certain kinds of equipment.
“I’m used to the old school,” said Jankovits. “I grew up in this industry using high rate sand filters. I could walk into a pump room and know what issues to look for with my high rate sand filter if I didn’t hear the pump working or the motor working or the water going through the valves.”
The Island Waterpark, however, doesn’t use sand filters. It relies on regenerative media filters – a more recent filtration technology – to maintain water quality. Regenerative media filters use perlite-coated tubes to trap particles as they flow through the filter. Once the perlite becomes fully loaded, a vibration event known as a “bump” occurs, causing the trapped particles to fall to the bottom of the filter.
“With the media filter, it’s nice to be able to see on those machines or on the [MCP] screen, hey these systems are up and operational and running and I’m not constantly having to check each individual one.”
In addition to making the equipment room easier to maintain, Jankovits also appreciates how easy it is to customize the MCP to better align with the way he and his team operate and maintain the park.
“I love how easy it is to make adjustments,” said Jankovits. “For example, we used to name the slides alphabetically, but that confused people, so I was easily able to change what was “Slide A”, for example, to the “Sonic Serpent” and now no one’s confused about which attraction is which.”
The Impact
Since its opening in 2023, The Island Waterpark’s two MCP controllers have each contributed to making park operations efficient and straightforward. According to Jankovits, the MCPs have allowed him and his team to get routine work done quickly and painlessly.
“[The MCPs are] allowing us to get important work out in the pump room done quicker,” said Jankovits. “Starting things up in the morning is easier, too. We’re not going back and pushing this VFD, and then waiting for it to turn on and then going and doing the same thing to the next one. You push one button and the attraction turns on.”
As Jankovits and his team continue to build upon the park’s tremendous success in bringing a family-friendly atmosphere to Atlantic City, the facility’s two MCPs have also played a key role in helping them maintain a safe environment.
When asked what keeps him up at night, Waterpark Director Ryan Flynn said safety is his number one concern.
“Like always in this type of facility, my biggest priority is just trying to make sure to prevent any injuries,” said Flynn. “Our goal is to make sure that everyone who enters the waterpark, leaves the waterpark with a smile on their face.”
For Flynn and Jankovits, the MCPs act as a critical safeguard, continuously monitoring the park’s systems and providing early warnings for potential issues.
“It’s like a comfort blanket,” said Jankovits. “It really just gives you a sense of knowing that you have an additional set of eyes watching what’s going on and it helps make it easier to see where things may be going wrong and helps you to take care of it before it becomes an issue.”
Interested in learning more? Reach out to SplashBotix today to specify SplashBotix standard controls on your next waterpark project.
