Advanced options
Water + sewerage combined rate; on an unmetered supply the fills cost nothing extra. The real cost of big pools is heating them, which the simple sum deliberately ignores: British summer tradition is cold water and complaints. A cover and a dash of pool care keeps one fill going for weeks instead of days.
What The Paddling Pool Cost Calculator Works Out
- Per fill: the pool's volume in cubic metres multiplied by your metered water rate (water plus sewerage, typically GBP 3 to GBP 4.50 per cubic metre in England and Wales). A 1,500-litre family pool costs about GBP 5.50 a fill at GBP 3.70; on an unmetered supply the fills cost nothing extra.
- Whole summer: the per-fill cost times the number of complete refills. Even a hefty family pool refilled four times costs less than one trip to a soft-play centre; the numbers only turn at the frame-pool frontier, where 12,000 litres drained carelessly runs to GBP 40-odd a season.
- Time to fill: litres divided by the hose flow rate. A typical garden hose on mains pressure delivers around 12 litres a minute, so a 12ft frame pool takes most of an afternoon. Filling pools is squarely banned when hosepipe restrictions bite.
- Custom pool size (advanced): enter the capacity printed on the box (or length x width x depth in metres x 1,000 x 0.8 for the usual fill level) to override the preset sizes.
- Hose flow rate (advanced): the simple sum assumes 12 litres a minute. Measure yours by timing a 10-litre bucket; low-pressure gardens manage 8, a good outside tap 15 or more.
- Weekly top-up and weeks up (advanced): a covered pool with a small filter keeps one fill serviceable for weeks, but splashing and evaporation still take 5% to 10% a week in a hot spell. The cost of not refilling is where pool ownership matures: a cover, a skimmer net and a few pounds of chlorine replace the water bill.
- Heating cost per fill (advanced): the wallet-killer the simple sum ignores. Warming water takes 0.001163 kWh per litre per degree, so lifting 5,500 litres by 10 degrees needs 64 kWh: about GBP 17 with a plug-in electric heater at the current price-cap unit rate, roughly a third of that with an air-source heat pump, or free but slow from a solar cover and patience.
- Summer total (advanced): fills plus heating plus top-ups, the honest season figure. Raising thousands of litres by ten degrees costs pounds per swim by any method, which is why British garden pools run on solar covers, black hose coils and denial.
- Water used all summer (advanced): the total litres through the pool, compared with 80-litre baths and the 142 litres a day the average person in England uses. The greywater from an unchlorinated paddling pool traditionally goes on the flowerbed. Supervise small children constantly around any standing water, empty or cover toddler pools between uses, and site frame pools on genuinely level ground: twelve tonnes of water is structural.