So five thousand liters/hr

OK then as a crude engineering estimate to one sig fig it takes one kilowatt-hour to boil away a liter of water (Am I mis-remembering? That seems extremely low), and the sun is up half the time, and one kilowatt for one hour is exactly one kilowatt-hour. Also we'll assume lawns are 100% thermodynamic black bodies turning all sunlight into heat (LOL). At noon, to one sig fig, you get a hundred watts of solar energy per sq foot. One acre is about fifty thousand square feet to one sig fig. Finally we'll assume the yard is not slowly sinking underneath a freshwater lake... over any give 24 hour period every liter must evaporate or the inhabitants will have to learn to swim.

So the lawn (or whatever) is turning ten thousand kilowatts of solar energy into water vapor.

To get ten thousand kilowatts at noon would take about about a hundred thousand square feet, or about two acres. At noon.

I only live on a one acre suburban lot, at that continuous flow rate, assuming no runoff, the water level would rise rather rapidly over a couple weeks.

It seems believable on a five acre lot but from time to time its going to get rather swampy. Honestly I'd look for a ten acre lot.

This is assuming no runoff (unlikely) and no electrical heat (like a Jacuzzi heated by natgas boiling away water continuously). This is also assuming no wind beyond blowing steam away.

A "two or so acre" artificial lake would be a quite believable evaporation rate. Put another way, were you to find a depression in the dirt, and turn on a hose at that flow rate, the surface area of the puddle would stop growing somewhere around a couple acres.

The numbers are "engineering believable".

Or, the really simple explanation - a big courtyard fountain, that doesn't recirculate. There's been examples of this in the past, fountain blasting away, and just draining the water.

Thanks, but that leaves doubt whether you wrote a decimal or thousands separator.

It is close to 5000 liters.

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures standardized using thin spaces as a thousands separator and either a period or comma for a decimal separator.

I recommend not adopting the mindset of using a comma or period as a thousands separator, as all it will do is lead to confusion depending on which country you're in.

An honest question: Do the regions that use a comma for a decimal separator still call it a decimal point?

Poland here - yep. We call it "punkt dziesiętny" which literally translates to "decimal point",even though we use a comma.

Not in the languages that I am familiar with. the big question is, whether it is before or after The Comma. The Comma does not need more qualifiers than that.

No, it's a comma. In Spanish, two point three is "dos coma tres".

Thanks. Removed the decimal separator, since it's surely not important.

The original data is 11.8 million gallons per year. Converting that into liters, then dividing by 365 * 24, and applying 3 sig figs to that result we get 5100 liters / hour.