Is your fish pond or water feature really leaking?

5/29/2018

Stepping outside to see your fish pond or water feature low on water can be a bit frightening sometimes. It's the one thing, aside from losing our fish, that pond hobbyists and water feature owners dread- A leak in their koi pond or water feature!
While leaks do happen, many times the water loss can be attributed to other factors and the dreaded leak is no more. Let's dive into this a little more.

Understanding Evaporation

Evaporation happens and it can happen at a rapid rate at times making it seem as though your pond has a leak. There are many factors in the environment that affect evaporation in our fish ponds, waterfalls and fountains.
The main factor is temperature and humidity. The hotter it is the more evaporation is going to occur. However, humidity plays a huge role in evaporation. Let's take two scenarios and try to break it down.

Scenario One:
It's 95 degrees outside and the humidity level is 95%. Evaporation is going to occur, however at a slower rate. Why? Because the air is almost to capacity as to how much water it can hold. Higher humidity slows down evaporation.

Scenario Two:
It's 95 degrees outside and the humidity level is 85%. The evaporation rate is going to be much greater than in scenario one. We have heat and a lower humidity level.

Scenario Three:
Let's say the temp is 80 but we have a humidity of 60%. While I'm not a meteorologist, but I would venture to guess this would prove to be a high evaporation rate.

While temperature and humidity play a role in the evaporation rates of our fish ponds, waterfalls, and fountains, our rate of water flow, stream length and type of waterfall all play a role in water loss and can increase evaporation. How? I know this sounds crazy right!
Here's the dirt on flow rates. You can lose on average from .5-3% of your pump flow in evaporation every day, yes you heard that correctly every day! Now, of course temperature, humidity, stream length, and waterfall type is the driving factor in the percentage you may lose. So let's put this into perspective.

Your pond has a 3000 gallon per hour pump and is a simple waterfall right on the edge of the pond and drops right in, no stream not other drops. You can expect to lose on average of 15-30 gallons of water each day in evaporation.

How much water?

The next step in this equation is to figure out how much water is in an inch of your pond or basin for you fountain or waterfall. This gets a little trickier. Once you figure out on average how much water you may lose in your pond due to evaporation, you need to know how much water is in an inch of your pond volume. Here's the Calculation:

(Avg Pond Width x Avg Pond Length) .85= Pond Square Feet
Pond Square Feet x .62= Gallons in One inch of your pond or water feature .

Now that you have the calculation to find out how much water is in 1 inch of your pond or basin, let's walk through an example using the flow rate from above.

Example: We have a 3000 gph pump and we know we could lose about 15-30 gallons per day.

Our pond is 11x16. 11x16x.85= 150 sq. ft.
150x.62= 93 gallons of water in one inch of our pond.

7 days x 15 gallons/day= 105 gallons
7 days x 30 gallons/day= 210 gallons

If we take our gallons per week and divide by the gallons of water in one inch of our pond that will give us a range of water loss we could experience in one week.

So on average this pond will lose 1-2" of water per week.

This can certainly get complicated, but we hope you have learned a little about how evaporation affects water loss in our ponds, waterfalls and fountains. So the next time you go outside and your pond is low, don't panic immediately. Take a breath, run the calculation and many times you'll find it's just evaporation.
Have a question about this, still a bit confusing. Please feel free to call us or send an email and we'll be happy to help you out.

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