It’s summer, which means millions of Americans will be cannonballing into the refreshing waters of their local pool to try to beat the heat. But with millions of pools in the country, have you ever wondered how much water it would actually take to fill all of them? Well, we have! And we did the math to figure it out. Let’s dive right in!
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We started off by looking at the specs of the average swimming pool in the United States. The typical size is 15 feet by 30 feet. The standard depth is approximately 5.5 feet, with a standard shallow end coming in at 3 feet and deep end at 8 feet. A pool with these dimensions would yield an average amount of 13,500 gallons of water.
Next, we investigated the number of pools that exist in America. In total, there are approximately 8.4 million swimming pools in this country. Looking in further detail, there are nearly 4.6 million private in-ground pools, 3.5 million private above-ground pools and 270,000 commercial swimming pools. Of the latter, 360,000 pools are categorized as year-round public pools. Take a moment to imagine all the backstrokes taking place in all those pools right now.
Having figured out how many pools exist in the United States, we then determined how much H2O it would take to fill them all. Taking our number of 8.4 million pools and multiplying it by our standard pool capacity of 13,500 gallons yields our total needed: 113 billion gallons!
Just how much is 113 billion gallons? To visualize, if you were to take the standard 15-by-30-foot pool and fill it with 113 billion gallons, that single pool would need to be 113 million feet deep to contain all that water. That’s more than a million times deeper than the deepest part of the ocean! If you were to take a swimming pool with the standard depth of 5.5 feet and try to fill it with 113 billion gallons, the pool would need to be 58 million miles wide and 117 million miles long to contain it all. One lap in a pool that size would be like swimming the length of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans 8,766 times. 113 billion gallons is equal to the water weight of 75 billion full-sized adults. It’s 1.72 days worth of water flowing over Niagara Falls. This much water could fill the chambers of approximately 610 billion Original Super Soakers. 113 billion gallons is also the equivalent of 762 days worth of all Coca-Cola products sold over the face of the Earth. How much would it take to clean 113 billion gallons of water in 8.4 million pools? The answer is 3.8 million chlorine tablets.
Finally, we broke down that pool usage across the country. In Arizona, there is a pool for every 8,628 people. In Florida, it’s one pool per 10,367 people. Meanwhile in Nevada, there is a pool for 10,841 people, Connecticut has a pool per 22,198 people and New Hampshire has one for every 24,063 persons. On a hot day, that is sure to be one crowded pool! Wherever you are, grab your bathing suit and make your way to one of the nearest 8.4 million swimming pools in this great nation.