Near as I can tell, as long as at least a 10l bucket is used, and it's accurately marked at 10l, the margin of error with the bucket approach is around +/- 5%. Not quite good enough for pressure drop prediction, as the quadratic nature of the pressure drop equation can make a 5% difference at say 4lpm be quite grossly mispredicted at 10lpm (by up to 30% inaccurate). If you're going to use the bucket approach, you can't really extrapolate the pressure results with any degree of confidence.
So is it good enough? For a single test at a single flow rate, yeah, it's "okay" as a rough indication for the home user.
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