How to tell if your pool is leaking, using your FKAA water meter

Every Key West pool loses some water to evaporation. Sun, wind and our long warm season can pull a quarter inch or more off the surface on a hot, breezy day, which is normal and no cause for alarm. A leak is different: it keeps taking water when the pool is covered, when the equipment is off, and in the dead of night. Telling the two apart used to mean guesswork. Now your water meter does most of the work for you.

Your FKAA smart meter is a leak detector

FKAA reads your water through a smart meter, and you can see that data yourself in the MyFKAA portal (start at FKAA’s View My Meter page). Two features matter here:

• 15-minute usage blocks. You can look at your consumption in fifteen-minute increments across the day, not just a monthly total.
• Continuous-use alerts. If you are signed up in the portal, FKAA’s system will email or call you when it sees water running continuously, the signature of a line that never shuts off.

A house behaving normally shows water use in bursts: a shower here, a dishwasher there, then long flat stretches of zero, especially overnight. A leak erases those flat stretches. If your 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. window shows steady flow while everyone is asleep and nothing is scheduled to run, something is leaking.

Ruling the pool in or out

A meter tells you something is leaking, not what. Work through it in order:

1. Silence the house. Turn off the icemaker fill, irrigation and any auto-features, and check that no toilet is running, a flapper leak is the most common false alarm.
2. Turn the pool equipment off, then watch the meter for an hour. Turn it on and watch again. A leak on the pressure side of the plumbing often shows up only when the pump runs.
3. Do the bucket test. Float a bucket of pool water on a step, mark the water line inside and out, and compare after 24 hours. If the pool drops faster than the bucket, that gap is a leak, not evaporation.
4. Watch your autofill. If your pool has an automatic filler, a leak is easy to miss because the pool level never changes, but the meter keeps climbing. This is exactly where the FKAA data earns its keep.

When it is the pool

Once the meter points at the pool, the usual culprits are the equipment pad (pump seals, valves and unions), the underground plumbing, or the shell and its fittings. In the Keys, salt air and flood-zone equipment pads make pad leaks especially common. That is repair territory, and our pool repair crew tracks them down without tearing up your whole deck to guess.

One Keys-specific warning: do not drain the pool to hunt for a leak. Our high water table can float an empty pool right out of the ground. Our new owner’s guide explains why that matters.

Buying a home with a pool? A leak is one of the first things we check on a pre-purchase pool inspection, because a slab or plumbing leak is a five-figure surprise you want to find before closing, not after.