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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 heats up differently and evaporates at a different rate, which breaks the comparison. Fill it to match the water level outside, and mark both levels before you start.

Not necessarily. Rain falls to the same depth into the bucket and into the pond, so it cancels out when PondCheck subtracts one from the other. That is why rainfall is never deducted from your result — doing that would double-count it and overstate the leak. The one thing rain can do is add 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 running the test again 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 hot 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 a second time to confirm, ideally in dry weather. Then try one test with the pump off and one with it on: if the loss grows when the pump runs, water is likely escaping somewhere in the plumbing; if it is unchanged, the shell, liner or seals are the more likely spot. PondCheck reports what you measured — it does not 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, and it is exactly the number the bucket gives you. In hot, dry, windy conditions a perfectly sound pool can drop several millimeters a day. What matters is not how much the water dropped, but how much more it dropped 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 and no subscription.