Yep. Same temperature; same configuration; same evaporative rate. Your big bucket idea fails that and is ludicrous.
Irrelevant to the pool example. You digress. A red herring.
The leak was too small to see in one day in an undulating pool. Your technique would totally fail.
Can you say "I don't understand science?" Or more specifically you could say, "I don't understand linear regression." But that's OK, not many people do.
You continually seem to want to argue the pool example. You give an inane way of handling the same problem. And, in the end, you reverse your original argument and agree with the crux of my pool example: that you don't need to know the amount of water in the pool. It's just the change in surface level that's important.
I will try to make it really really simple for you.
1. Suppose you have a good thermometer. You go around the house at noon and make measurements at many specific locations to roughly determine the average house temperature. Those measurements give you an average as a baseline value, but do not measure the true average, which would require an infinite number of measurements at an infinite number of locations.
2. Five hours later you go to those same specific locations and measure the temperatures again. You find the average temperature has risen by one degree.
3. You also have a friend double check, but he chooses different locations. His temperature measurements are generally two degrees higher than yours. Perhaps his locations were too close to a hot ceiling or other warm spots. However, the average he computes at noon and 5 hours later also gives a one degree rise.
4. The averages disagree because of sampling locations, but the differentials give the same warming.
5. Would you claim the there is no evidence of the house warming?
I hope you understand this example better than you did the pool analogy.
