We are having our pool filled in this week, so I went out with the DJI Inspire 1 and preproduction Zenmuse X5 camera and made an aerial 3D map of our house (processed using both Pix4DMapper Pro and DroneDeploy’s new—and free—Map Engine beta). 

I decided that I wanted to measure the volume of the empty pool to see how much dirt the demolition company might need to bring. First, I created a scale constraint in Pix4D, which tells the model how big it is. I measured a big tile in the yard, which was about 1.9 meters. Pix4D’s calculations had already measured it to be 1.884 meters, with +-0.1m error, which is really impressive. Then, I selected the area around the pool, and in 1 click, Pix4D told me that the total fill volume is 75.87 cubic meters (2679.3 cubic feet), with +-0.58 cubic meters error. The US NIST says that the average density of dirt is 120 lbs per cubic foot. That means that they will have to bring in 321,516 lbs, or 160 tons of dirt! Of course, they will demolish the top 2′ of concrete and stone and push it into the bottom of the pool first, so that will save them a bit of hauling. I wonder what the capacity is of their trucks.

I think I’m going to send these measurements to the demolition company to help them prepare!