To bring you up to speed about these mats, they are part of the Circle design that no-one wants us to build. There is an awful amount of science just waiting to be used out there, but everyone seems stuck in the Dark Ages!

Yikkity, a valuable post and I'm not picking a fight with you. However, it is EXTREMELY unlikely that salt will cause a pickup, for the simple reason that it will melt the ice (by raising the temperature by which the ice needs to freeze). In other words, the salt grains will simply make holes in the ice and so be beyond the reach of the running bands of the stones. I can remember a strange experience one morning when I turned up for work and found a hole in my beautiful ice. At the bottom of the hole was the remains of a mint sweetie that someone had dropped the night before -- the sugar (a salt) had allowed it to melt itself into the ice.

Salt from anywhere is not good news for curling ice, and we too had the problem in cold weather. It soon became clear that salt could cause small areas of the ice surface to become very slippery (due to raising the IST) but very little else. H&S dictates that safety is important, and for that reason salt was not used to make road surfaces safe outside the rink while I was in charge. The problem did not recur, but of course the dirt fragments did.

I would suppose that there is no 'one' solution to the 'pick-up' problem.

On that basis every piece of kit, that requires no input from the Personnel on the Ice, should be used when play is at this level. However, it would be impossible to remove all potential sources, that might carry Pick-ups, so they were, in some senses, lucky.