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In the water. Float it, or stand it on a step so the water inside sits at roughly the same level as the pond or pool. A bucket left on dry ground in the sun warms differently and evaporates at a different rate, which breaks the comparison. Fill it to match the outside level and mark both levels before you start.

Not necessarily. Rain falls to the same depth into the bucket and the pond, so it cancels out as soon as PondCheck subtracts one from the other. That's why rainfall is never deducted from your result — deducting it would count the rain twice and overstate the leak. What rain can do is carry runoff from the surrounding ground into the pond, which the bucket never collects. So after heavy rain PondCheck lowers the confidence of the reading and suggests repeating the test over a dry stretch.

Six hours is the minimum for a rough signal. Twenty-four hours or more is what we recommend, because a full day covers one complete cycle of warm afternoon and cool night. Forty-eight hours makes small differences easier to read, since a slow leak has more time to separate itself from evaporation.

Run the test again to confirm, ideally in dry weather. Then try one test with the pump off and one with it on: if the loss grows while the pump runs, water is likely escaping somewhere in the plumbing; if it's unchanged, the shell, liner or seals are the more likely spot. PondCheck reports what you measured — it doesn't diagnose the cause, and for anything beyond a quick check a pond or pool professional is the right next step.

That depends entirely on your weather, which is exactly the number the bucket gives you. In a hot, dry, windy week a perfectly sound pool can drop several millimetres a day. What matters isn't how far the water fell, but how much further it fell than the bucket.

No. A bucket, something to mark the levels with — tape, a marker, a grease pencil — and a ruler or tape measure. No sensors, no hardware, no subscription.