How To Detect A Pool Leak: The Pool Bucket Test

How To Detect If Your Inground Pool Is Leaking

This video is to help you determine if you have a leak in your pool and that you need to call a professional to get a leak detection done to help you identify it. Now, sometimes you may just have a basic leak in your equipment and you physically can see that that’s one way. But if you think it may be underground or you just can’t find it, one simple thing that you can do is what’s called the pool bucket test.

How To Use The Pool Bucket Test

What we usually do is take a five-gallon bucket and we are going to fill the bucket up a third to halfway with water, and then we are going to set it on the first step of the pool. Now, the reason why I add so much water is so the bucket doesn’t start floating around. And then you’re going to also have a water line within the bucket itself on the outside.

What you’re going to do next is you’re going to take a piece of tape or a marker, and you’re going to mark on the outside of the bucket where your pool water is touching. And whatever that level is, it’s usually a few inches above the bottom of the bucket, depending on how far or how deep that first step is.

Then you’re going to take the inside of the bucket and mark the line on how much water you put in. Those two lines do not have to be the same. What you’re doing is you’re going to let the pool run normally and then after 24 hours, you’re going to check and see if there’s any difference.

If the outside of the bucket, which is your pool water is still lower, let’s say it drops a quarter of an inch because of evaporation. If it is the same as inside the bucket and you drop to a quarter inch, then you don’t have a leak. You’re just losing water to evaporation. And there are actually charts out there that you can type in your zip code and it’ll take your temperatures and what your weather has been like and it can tell you on average how much water your pool would lose in that area. That can help you decide if it’s just evaporation.

But if you notice that your pool water level on the outside dropped, let’s say, an inch and you only dropped a quarter or eighth of an inch inside the bucket after 24 hours, then you’ve identified that you have a leak somewhere.

At that time, I would call a professional to come out and help you discover where that leak is.

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