As a home inspector, there have been times where it was important, as a service to my client, to guesstimate the quantity of water that was collected in a given location. In one case, in a garage, I found an old pit for working under a car. This under the slab pit was about 8 feet long, 4 feet across and 5 feet deep. The problem here, unfortunately, was that the pit was full of water and lots of old oil. It was considered to be hazardous waste so state regulations applied and the estimate of cleanup costs was based on quantity. How many gallons were in there? To find out, we use our nifty little online calculator that was designed for storage tanks but works for all cubic measurements. We enter 8 x 4 x 5 ft.
With the dimensions above, that is 160 cubic feet of water. That is not a number one can readily visualize or gets too excited about. However, click the calculator again, to calculate gallons, and you find that we are talking about hauling away 1195 gallons of contaminated liquid. Now, that puts things in better perspective.
I had another handy use for it recently. I was inspecting a home that had significant standing water in the crawl space (even down under the vapor barrier) in two locations. Estimate that the first wet location was an area of about 15' x 15' and the water was fairly consistent in depth and an average of 3" deep. (I err to the side of underestimating here, so I am not blowing anything out of proportion). We put in our calculator 15 ', 15' and .25 (for the 3" in depth). When we convert it, that is 56 cubic feet of water or 420 gallons of water.
In another area, there was a patch of water about 10' x 10' and 2" deep average. We find that area has 16 cubic feet of water or 123 gallons. Add those two areas together and that means there are 543 gallons of water in the crawl space. That number is something we can all relate to, just think of 543 gallons of gas or 543 gallons of milk.
In a case where the client is trying to determine if water is a problem, being able to better quantify the amount of water is very helpful to the client. "543 gallons" brings the issue into much better focus than saying: There are two areas with standing water in the crawl space. The first one is about 15x15 ft and the other is 10x10 ft. At these locations the depth of the water averages 2 to 3". Obviously, when possible, giving a reasonable evaluation of the amount of water involved is preferable to just stating there is water in the crawl space.
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