How does evaporation work? I'm trying to determine if my swimming pool has a leak.?

Answer 1

As the air temperature is now dropping, you will be losing more to evaporation if you're still keeping your pool heat up. Anytime the pool is warmer than the ambient air temperature, with the heat loss, you'll experience water loss.
There's a very simple test to determine if you are losing water by evaporation or if it's something else. It's called the bucket test.
Take a plastic pail, put a round weight in it (no sharpies) and place the pail on a pool step, such that it's in the water, but not submerged totally. Fill the bucket with pool water until the level of the water in the bucket is the same as the level of the pool water, when viewed from the side. Measure it if the bucket won't allow you to see through it a bit. When both are equal, leave it for 24 hours. If it rains, don't worry, the bucket will fill at the same rate as the pool. If at the end of 24 hours, both levels are still equal to each other, then there is no leak in your pool. It was all evaporation. The water in that bucket is the same temp as the pool water and will evaporate at the same rate, so no difference in levels, no problem in pool.
If the level in the pool is lower than the level in the bucket, you have a leak somewhere in the pool itself.
This test is the first thing I suggest people try. It's free, takes very little effort and is 100% accurate. With some modification on how you do this test, you can even figure out if a pool has a leak in a plumbing line or in the pool itself.

Answer 2

evaporation is simply liquid water changing to a gaseous state. It happens more often when the weather is warmer, drier or windier. If you get all 3 at once, the water will evaporate fastest. Your pool company should be able to tell you if you have a leak, based on how much water you have to replace daily.

What kind of pool do you have? In ground, above ground? Cement, gunnite, vinyl liner? I have used scuba gear to inspect one or two pools, and patched holes in the vinyl liner. I'm not a pool professional by any means, I was just helping a friend. Wherever I found a hole, I glued on a patch. On the biggest leak, there was a void behind the liner where the sand had washed out. This was easy to find and fairly easy to patch, but there wasn't much to do about the void unless the owner wanted to break through the cement around the edge of the pool.

Answer 3

My pool has a leak and i only noticed because the water level kept getting lower and there was this patch of grass about 2 ft from the pool that kept growing. ( that patch turned out to be where the underground leak was) I would look out for obvious signs.

Answer 4

as the water heats up usually just the surface temperature, it's molecules break down into steam and float up into the atmosphere. You cant see it happening, and for a pool it would take an awful long time for it to evaporate enough for you to notice.