How much is a million litres of water?
We hear water figures all the time — "the reservoir lost 20 cubic hectometres", "the leak
spilled a million litres", "a shower uses 60 litres" — but our brains are bad at picturing
them. The tool above draws whatever amount you type using icons: each icon is
something you already know (a glass, a bathtub, a tanker truck, an Olympic pool), so the
figure becomes something you can count at a glance. Below it, a human equivalence: what a
whole city would drink, or you yourself over the years.
The water ladder: from a glass to a reservoir
The tool picks the right reference for each amount by itself (and you can change it with
the "Show" selector). These are the rungs:
| Reference | Litres |
|---|
| 🥛 A glass of water | 0.25 |
| 🍾 A large bottle | 1.5 |
| 🧍 What one person drinks per day | 2 |
| 🏠 Household use per person per day (Spain) | 133 |
| 🛁 A full bathtub | 150 |
| 🚛 A tanker truck | 30,000 |
| 🏊 An Olympic swimming pool | 2,500,000 |
| 🌊 A cubic hectometre (the reservoir unit) | 1,000,000,000 |
Example amounts of water
Click any of these figures to see it drawn above:
- A tanker truck: 30,000 litres
- An Olympic swimming pool: 2,500,000 litres
- What Madrid drinks in a day: about 6,700,000 litres
- One person's household water use for a year: about 48,500 litres
- A cubic hectometre, the unit used for reservoirs: 1,000,000,000 litres
- An acre-foot, the US reservoir unit: about 326,000 gallons
Frequently asked questions about litres and water
- How many litres are in an Olympic swimming pool?
- An Olympic swimming pool (50 × 25 metres, minimum 2 metres deep) holds about 2.5 million litres of water, i.e. 2,500 cubic metres — roughly 660,000 US gallons.
- How many litres is a cubic hectometre?
- A cubic hectometre (hm³), the unit used for reservoirs, is 1 billion litres: the equivalent of about 400 Olympic swimming pools.
- How much water does a person drink per day?
- Common recommendations are around 2 litres (about half a gallon) of drinking water a day. In a year, one person drinks about 730 litres.
- How many litres are in a gallon?
- A US gallon is 3.785 litres. The other way around, one litre is about 0.26 US gallons.
- How much water is an acre-foot?
- An acre-foot — the unit used for reservoirs and water management in the US — is the volume that covers one acre of land one foot deep: about 326,000 US gallons, or 1.23 million litres.
Want to visualize areas or distances instead of water? Try the
Hectareometer, which draws how much any number of hectares covers on a
real map, or the distances tool. You can also check examples
like 1000 hectares.