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In the water. Float it, or stand it on a shelf or 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 up differently and evaporates at a different rate, which ruins 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 the moment PondCheck subtracts one from the other. That's why rainfall is never deducted from your result — deducting it would count the rain twice and exaggerate the leak. What rain can do is wash run-off 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 in a dry spell.

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

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

It depends entirely on your weather, which is precisely the number the bucket gives you. In a hot, dry, breezy 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 chinagraph pencil — and a ruler or tape measure. No sensors, no hardware, no subscription.