Letter: Intuition is awash in misconception

Sometimes our intuition is wrong. A big misconception regarding swimming pools deals with how much water they use. In our drought times, people complain that homes with pools use too much water.

But last year, the Los Angeles Times printed an article with studies showing that the water evaporating from swimming pools is 7% to 17% less than that used to water landscaping of the same size as the pool and deck, depending on whether or not the pool had a cover, and whether the landscaping was water-wise or normal turf.

Since I own a pool, I wanted to know how much water my pool uses compared to my lawn. During the twice-a-week watering, and now with the once-weekly program, I started treating my pool like the landscape, for watering purposes, and added water for the same time period as my lawn-watering — and this was sufficient to keep the pool water at the proper level. After doing this for many months, I made an interesting discovery.

In my backyard, the pool (15 feet wide by 30 feet long, covered) and deck consist of 1,160 square feet, and the lawn is 600 square feet, for a total of 1,760 square feet, meaning the pool and deck are nearly two-thirds of the entire area. Since I water the lawn and the pool for 15 minutes each (assuming the flow to each be equal), that means the lawn takes almost twice as much water per square foot as the pool. This has been true both when watering twice a week, and now, once.

Moreover, I just received my “Home Water Report” from the BWP. It shows that our home uses 26% less water than the average Burbank home with the same number of occupants.

So much for intuition.

Robert Phipps

Burbank