Frequently asked questions

Water levels come from Environment Agency real-time gauges via the flood-monitoring API, which report every 15 minutes to an hour. Wind forecasts come from Open-Meteo, which serves government models including the Met Office UKV, NOAA's GFS, ECMWF, and DWD ICON. Radar is RainViewer. Launch ramps, marinas, and clubs come from OpenStreetMap. Everything is public data — we match gauges to lakes and present it.

A 0–10 rating for every hour: full marks for wind inside your comfort band, minus penalties for gust factor, rain/thunderstorm probability, and cold air. It comes in three profiles — Beginner/Kayak (3–10 kt), Cruising dinghy (6–16 kt), and Performance/Wing (8–22 kt) — and you can switch profiles on any lake dashboard.

No and no. LakePulse UK is free and account-free. Saved lakes, sailor profiles, and wind alerts are stored in your own browser (localStorage) — nothing about you reaches our servers because there are no servers holding user data.

Set an alert on the Saved page ("tell me when Lake X is between 8 and 16 knots"). While any LakePulse UK tab is open, the site periodically checks your alerts against live forecasts and fires a browser notification when a window opens. No email, no push service, no server — your browser does the checking.

No cookies, no analytics, no ad trackers — nothing follows you across sites. We do store things in your browser: your saved lakes, profile, and alerts (features you actively use), and — if you accept the privacy banner — short-lived caches of forecast data so pages load faster. "Essential only" in the banner turns the caches off, and you can reopen the banner any time via "Privacy choices" in the footer. Either way, nothing personal ever leaves your device.

We list lakes and reservoirs with an active Environment Agency gauge reporting water level. That means England only for now — Scotland (SEPA) and Wales (NRW) publish their gauge data differently and are on the roadmap. Some waters are gauged only for flow, and a few well-known lakes are monitored outside the open API entirely. Those are excluded rather than shown with broken data.

The Environment Agency real-time API currently publishes water level and flow but not water temperature. The dashboard is honest about that and shows an estimate derived from recent air temperatures on the fishing tab — treat it as a rough proxy, not a gauge reading.

Wind updates on page view from the latest model run (Open-Meteo best-match, UKV-class near-term). Water data refreshes from the Environment Agency every 15–60 minutes per gauge. Each reading shows how old it is ("12 min ago") so you can judge for yourself.

EA gauges report stage — water level in metres above each station's own datum. For lake and reservoir gauges it tracks the true surface height; the absolute number matters less than the trend for slips, margins, and moorings. Our glossary has a full guide.

Yes — every lake has a Fishing tab with solunar feeding times (computed for the lake's timezone), live water temperature where a sensor exists, temperature-driven species notes tuned to UK coarse and game fish, and best-fishing windows for the next 48 hours combining all of it.

Yes — the embed builder at /embed generates a free iframe widget for any lake in our database, in light or dark, that always shows live data. No key, no maintenance.

No. We are an independent site that uses their excellent public data, published under the Open Government Licence. Always verify conditions against official sources before making decisions on the water.