Is Your Pool Leaking Money?

How many times have you turned on the water to bring your pool’s water level back up and at the same time found yourself wondering, “Is this normal?” More often than not, water loss in your swimming pool can be attributed to simple evaporation. Gotta love the sun, right? After all, isn’t that why you invested in a pool to begin with?

All pool owners will face evaporation and find themselves having to add additional water to their pool on a somewhat regular basis during the Summer season. This process is very normal and needs to be expected. Due to a variety of environmental and pool related conditions, such as wind, water temperature, dew point, barometric pressure and usage along with many other factors, the evaporation rate can vary greatly from day to day and even pool to pool.  

However, as you get more familiar with the “Pool Life”, you will find sometimes that the amount of water you actually have to add seems to be a bit more than what you would consider normal. If this happens to be the case, you could potentially have an unseen leak in your swimming pool. To help you determine if it is a leaking pool or just simply evaporation, there is an easy test that you can do at home.

This is called “The Bucket Test”.

There are many variations of this test and all of them work in the same way. Here we will go over an easy setup of this test so you will know if your water loss is from evaporation or if in fact you do have a leak.

All you will need is a bucket, a marker or some tape, a pool of course and a little bit of patience.

Basically, the bucket test exposes water in a bucket to the same conditions as those affecting your swimming pool. By comparing the water loss in each, it is possible to determine if the pool is actually leaking or if or if the water loss is simply the result of water being lost to the air.