Where is my Water!!

Every August, we get the same call: "My pond is down almost a foot and nobody can tell me why." Before anyone assumes the liner is torn or the dam is failing, the first question we ask is simple — how much water, and how fast?

Texas heat alone can move a lot of water. But there's a line between "that's just summer" and "you have a leak," and knowing where that line sits can save an HOA or property owner thousands of dollars in unnecessary excavation.

What normal evaporation actually looks like

Under everyday conditions, a healthy pond loses somewhere in the range of a tenth to a quarter of an inch of water per day to evaporation alone. That's the baseline you'd expect almost anywhere.

Texas summers push well past that baseline. Once daily highs sit above 90°F and wind gets involved, evaporation on North Texas ponds commonly runs 1 to 2 inches per week. Wind matters more than most people expect — it strips the humid boundary layer right off the water's surface, and a jump from a light breeze to 15–20 mph winds can roughly double the evaporation rate with no change in temperature at all.

State-level data backs this up. Texas A&M researchers tracking evaporation across the state's major reservoirs have found July consistently produces the highest losses of the year, and the long-term trend is climbing — evaporation rates across Texas reservoirs are increasing by roughly 1.1 inch per decade as the state warms.

Shallow water makes it worse. A pond that's silted in and running a foot or two shallower than it was built to be heats up faster in the sun, which accelerates evaporation and creates a feedback loop — the shallower it gets, the faster it evaporates. This is one of the quieter reasons ponds with years of unmanaged sediment buildup seem to "lose more water than they used to." It isn't losing more water. It's holding less to begin with.

Where the "just heat" explanation stops making sense

If your pond is dropping more than about 2 inches a week — and especially if it's still dropping on cooler, calmer days when evaporation should be minimal — that's no longer a weather story. That's a water-balance problem, and it usually comes down to one of a few things:

• A compromised liner or clay seal, common in older ponds that were never properly sealed or where the original compacted clay layer has cracked or eroded

• Subsurface seepage through sandy or permeable soil pockets that weren't accounted for during original construction

• A structural failure point — a cracked outlet pipe, a failing spillway, or erosion around a drain structure that's slowly draining the pond from below

• Root intrusion from large trees near the bank, which can open channels through a liner or clay cap over time

The tell is consistency. Evaporation tracks the weather — it slows down when it's cloudy or cool and speeds up during a heat wave. A leak doesn't care what the thermometer says. If the drop rate stays flat regardless of conditions, something structural is moving that water, not the sun.

A simple way to check before calling anyone

You don't need instrumentation to get a first read. Drive a stake or mark a dock post at the current water line, note the date, and check it again in 48–72 hours under stable weather. Do the math against the ranges above for your pond's size and exposure. If you're tracking meaningfully above 2 inches a week with no wind or heat event to explain it, that's worth a professional look before it becomes a bigger repair.

Why this matters more than it seems

A slow leak rarely announces itself. It shows up as a pond that "just needs topping off more than it used to," until a dry summer exposes how much ground has actually been lost — sometimes literally, in the form of exposed banks, undermined slopes, or a spillway structure that's been quietly failing for a season or two. Catching it early is almost always a fraction of the cost of catching it late.

It's also worth remembering that a pond running shallow from years of accumulated sediment isn't just an evaporation problem — it's usually the same underlying issue that eventually shows up as algae blooms, fish kills, and odor complaints once the muck layer gets thick enough. Water loss is often just the first visible symptom of a pond that's due for maintenance.

If your pond's water level has you asking questions this summer, we're happy to take a look and tell you plainly whether you're dealing with Texas heat or something underneath it.

Elite Excavation & Haul-Off, LLC — commercial earthwork and pond restoration serving the DFW metro.