Ice rinks have a simultaneous cooling and heating demand to maintain the ice slab and providing the required heat to different needs in the ice rink facility. This provides a potential for utilising a heat recovery function, which is used in many ice rinks with traditional ammonia (R717) systems, however using carbon dioxide (R744) as a refrigerant in a trans-critical system can provide a fully self-sufficient ice rink in terms of heat. In R744 systems more heat is available at higher temperature levels, whereas in R717 systems the largest heat portion is present at condensing temperature level, which does not fulfill high temperature heating demand. In this study energy saving potential with heat recovery systems in ice rinks is evaluated. A system solution is developed, modelled and evaluated. One objective is to look at using R744 as refrigerant in ice rinks, however, focusing on the heat recovery aspect. In order to check the applicability, a R744 system with heat recovery is compared to traditional R717 refrigeration system with a propane (R290) heat pump. Data from an ice rink in operation is used to map the heating demand during season and to increase credibility. The results show that heat recovery performance in ice rink with R744 direct refrigeration system uses 47 MWh less energy than in indirect R717 systems with R290 heat pump, which constitute to 16%.