Craft Quantities
Plan & Takeoffs

By trade

Pools and water calculators

Everything about a pool is per cubic metre, so the volume is the one figure worth getting exactly right. A sloping floor makes it an average-depth problem rather than a simple box, and a volume that is out by a tenth makes every dose, every turnover and every heating figure out by a tenth too.

  • 16Calculators
  • 1Parts of the site

How pools and water is measured

Cubic metres or gallons for the water, turnovers per day for the pump, kilowatts for the heater against a surface area and a temperature rise, and grams per cubic metre for chemistry. Covers and liners are square metres on the wetted surface, not the plan.

What gets left off a pools and water order

  • Average depth. A pool with a shallow end and a deep end is not the volume of either, and using the deep end over-doses everything.
  • Evaporation, which is the largest heat loss an uncovered outdoor pool has, by a wide margin.
  • Turnover as a design target rather than a pump specification: the flow needed is set by the volume and the hours.
  • The wetted surface for a liner, which includes the walls and the steps and is always larger than the water's plan area.

Job takeoffs1

Where pool installers meet the rest of the job: each runs one of these calculators, with every other trade in the same job beside it.

Comparisons3

Two ways of doing the same work, weighed against each other.