How Often Should I Shock My Pool? Shocking your pool regularly will help to keep the water clean and free of contaminants. You should aim to shock your pool about once a week, with the additional shock after heavy use. Some tell-tale signs that your pool needs to be shocked are cloudy, foamy, green, or odourous water.
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.
It's often recommended to shock your pool once a week. If you don't do it every week, you should at least do it every other week. This is necessary to maintain your pool's water chemistry. If you have a lot of people over in your pool or have a party, you may want to shock your pool more frequently.
So if you buy liquid shock, be aware that it only lasts one to two months at the most before it starts to lose effectiveness. While many swimming pool chemicals stay good for years if stored correctly, some pool-maintenance supplies expire more quickly.
After Shocking Your Pool
It is safe to swim once your chlorine levels are around 5 ppm or after 24 hours. It is always best to test first!
Do Chlorine Tablets Go Bad? The simple answer to this question is yes. Like any chemicals, chlorine tablets go bad if left long enough or improperly stored. Kept in the right conditions, however, and they can remain effective for over five years.
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.
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.
Liquid chlorine and granular shock have the same active chemical that sanitizes your pool, what changes is the strength and the way you use it. Liquid chlorine is less costly, unstabilized and comes in liquid form. Granular shock is stabilized and comes in a solid form that dissolves in your pool.
It's pretty tough to over-shock your pool; shocking your pool two days in a row with the proper dosage for your pool volume shouldn't be a problem – and in fact, is sometimes even needed to rid your pool of algae and other contaminants.
A pool filter should be run for a minimum of 6 hours after shocking a swimming pool. This is to allow the filter to clean the water and give the shock enough time to fully mix with the pool water. Running the filter after shocking for 24 hours to 7 days is necessary if the pool has a large amount of algae.
So, not only is shocking a saltwater pool okay, but it's actually important to your pool's health. Shocking is the process in which you overload your pool with chlorine (3-5 times the normal amount) to improve your pool's cleanliness and kill off organic matter.
How Often Should I Shock My Pool? Shocking your pool regularly will help to keep the water clean and free of contaminants. You should aim to shock your pool about once a week, with the additional shock after heavy use. Some tell-tale signs that your pool needs to be shocked are cloudy, foamy, green, or odourous water.
High doses of chlorine, like pool shock, can cause temporary cloudiness as it kills contaminants. High levels of pH, alkalinity, and calcium hardness are more likely to cause cloudy water.
If your total chlorine level is high, you will use a non-chlorine shock; if it is low, you will use a chlorinated shock. As a rule, you will need to raise free chlorine to 10 times your combined chlorine to hit what is known as “break point.” Therefore, it is good to deal with combined chlorine while it is still small.
This is because when you mix chlorine and algaecide together, it renders both of them useless. Hence, you should first shock the pool and wait for the chlorine levels to fall below 5 PPM.
You can also simply add more chlorine, and pouring household bleach into the pool is one way to do this. Be sure the pH is in the proper range -- between 7.2 and 7.8 -- and add the bleach in the early evening to avoid having most of it degraded by sunlight.
Running your pool pump during a lightning or electrical storm should be avoided as a power surge or nearby lightning strike could damage your pump. However running your pump during is beneficial. The extra filtering will help clean out the impurities rain has introduced into your pool's water.
Overall, the lessons learned today is you should run your pool pump an average 8 hours a day to properly circulate and clean your water. The pump should push your entire pool in gallons in this 8 hour period of time. Residential pool water only needs to be turned over once daily to have proper filtration.
It may be cheaper to run the pump at night, but honestly you should run it 1 hour a day per 10 degrees of temperature at least, and it should be during the day. Running the pump at night should only be when you are doing a major chemical treatment such as algae clean-up.
All pool chemicals, aside from unstabilised liquid chlorine, are good for up to three to five years as long as they're stored in a cool and dark place away from sunlight and they're packed in air-tight containers. Granular chlorine can be re-packed to extend its shelf life.
Liquid chlorine is preferred over chlorine tablets by pool professionals however home swimming pools will benefit too. Liquid chlorine quickly raises or maintains chlorine levels without raising stabilizer. Chlorine tablets maintain chlorine levels and add stabilizer to the pool water.
The rule of thumb is that dry chemicals for your pool and liquid pool acid will last if stored in a cool, dry place. In fact, with proper storage, the pool chemicals should remain usable for years. ... For example, dry pool chlorine will not expire for a long time, while liquid pool chlorine will expire quickly.