How to Calculate the Height of Waterfall Steps

Waterfall steps are in gardens and patios.

Waterfall steps are sloping steps seen in gardens and home patios. These are a nice design to help improve the look of your house. If you know how far out you want the waterfall steps to go and approximately how far it is from the top of the steps to the bottom step, you can use trigonometry to calculate the height of these steps. This is a basic skill you would have learned in high school that you can apply to every day life.

Instructions

1. Measure from the top of the step diagonally down to the bottom step. This is the hypotenuse. For example, assume the hypotenuse is 10 feet.

2. Measure how far out the steps reach. In the example, assume the steps reach out 8 feet.

3. Square your two measurements. This means multiply the measurement by itself. In the example, 10 squared equals 100 and 8 squared equals 64.

4. Subtract the one measurement from the squared hypotenuse. In the example, 100 minus 64 equals 36. This is your height squared.

5. Find the square root of the height squared to calculate height. In the example, the square room of 36 is 6 feet. Therefore, your height is 6 feet.

References

• Math is Fun: Pythagoras Theorem