Shocking your pool isn't necessary, although, it's not a bad idea either. If you get an extremely heavy rain fall, you could shock your pool for good measure. This will help fight off any contaminants that the rain may have brought to your pool.
Use shock treatment on your pool one or two days before the storm. Add chlorine levels significantly during the treatment and let it run for 24 hours to allow the treatment to fill the entire pool. Make sure all furniture or items around your pool are safe to prevent injury to persons or property.
The Department of Environmental Health recommends avoiding activities such as swimming, surfing, and diving for 72 hours after it rains. Research has shown that the risk of infection is the highest during and the day after rain, and declines to around normal levels after three days.
Swimming in the rain isn't worth the risk of getting hurt. Stay away from the pool during rain showers, and if you must enter the area for whatever reason, bring someone along so you aren't alone around the water.
With a rain storm, any number of contaminants can be washing into your pool – acid rain, pollen, insects, tree droppings, dust, sand and even phosphates. Any one or combination of these things in rain can make your pool cloudy.
In this case, you should double shock your swimming pool water. To double shock, you will need to add 2 pounds for every 10,000 gallons of water. For instance, if you pool is 20,000 gallons, you will add 4 pounds of shock.
Adding a recommended dose of shock to your pool can clear it right up. Poor circulation or filtration can contribute to cloudy water. Make sure your pump and filter are working properly.
1. Shock the pool with chlorine every day until all the green is gone (possibly 3 to 4 days). 2. Run the filter 24 hours a day and backwash every day until the green and then cloudiness is gone (usually up to 7 days, sometimes as long as 2 weeks depending on the filter).
What happens if too much shock is added? You cannot overshock a swimming pool or add too much. Adding too much shock or overshocking your pool will kill off algae. The negative of adding too much shock is it will upset the chemical balance of your pool.
Run your filtration system for eight hours every day over summer. Back-wash it if you have a sand filter and clean cartridges with Filtrite Filter Cleaner and Degreaser. Add 50 grams of Sanit-eezy Performance per 10,000 litres of pool water. No-one should swim for at least 30 minutes after this.
Final Thoughts. Running your filter after shocking your pool is a must and is just as important to your pool as shocking it is. Be sure to run your filter for at least 6 hours, but shoot for 24 hours to several days, if your pool is particularly dirty or has algae, to properly circulate the chlorine and clean the water ...
Chlorine is a sanitizer, and (unless you use Baquacil products) is necessary for maintaining a clear and healthy pool. Shock is chlorine, in a high dose, meant to shock your pool and raise the chlorine level quickly.
Adding Shock Directly Into The Pool Water
Don't worry—you can't overshock your pool. But beyond fashion faux pas, adding shock directly to the pool water if you have a vinyl liner can be a disaster. The shock granules will sink the bottom and bleach out your liner.
A good rule of thumb is to wait 72 hours after it rains before going into the ocean. Some scientists recommend five days, especially if the beach is close to an area where the river or an outfall dumps into the ocean.
It can happen, though. For instance, people who have had laryngectomies have to be particularly careful around water, as they are in danger of drowning from aspiring water in heavy rain or in the shower. Sadly, many people drown because of rain - but usually bcause the rain causes flooding.
If you're swimming in distilled water, your conductivity might be as much as 10,000 - 100,000 times better than the pool water. When lightning strikes the pool, the discharge current will flow through the poorly-conducting water towards all of the grounded lighting and pool plumbing systems.