I have selected "Has water" in the cell properties.

I try and edit the height value of the water, everything seems to go well though there is no change in the render window.

I go back to the cell properties, the water height has reset to 0.

Is there a better way to place water?

Or is it a bug?

Ran into the same thing myself, no idea on a fix for the problem. You can work around it to some extent by using water chunks form the activator section (filter water1024), hope that helps.

Thanks for the possible workaround!

Having the same issue myself, couldn't figure out what i was doing wrong. Now it seems maybe its a bug ?

Thanks for the suggested workaround, going to go try this now.

As far as I know all interior water is done with placable object waters. Look in some vanilla cells to learn the water types. I've never seen, or personally used the 'has water' checkbox or set that height. Plus, you shouldn't need to. The placeable waters are huge so unless your cell is a MASSIVE cave like Blackreach, you wont need actual water. And if it's that big, you should probably make it an exterior worldspace, like Blackreach.

Where are these placeable waters?

This makes me think maybe that setting only works for exterior spaces then ? Would make sense.

Anyway, using a placeable water object makes more sense to me.