Nov
19
The Importance of Pool Shock
Filed Under Maintenance & Cleaning
We recently spoke with a young woman who couldn’t seem to keep her small 32-foot pool fog-free. No matter what she did, her pool water wouldn’t stay clear for any longer than a day — and the only time that it did clear was when she refilled it! Although her daily maintenance routine was pretty good, she didn’t quite understand the role of pool shock and after describing her use of it (or lack of, rather), we were able to determine the problem.
Apparently this young woman didn’t understand the power of this swimming pool treatment and she regarded it as unimportant. She barely used it and since she didn’t understand how it worked, she favored insufficient chlorine treatments over shock. In her words, “I thought putting chlorine into the pool everyday was sufficient… I had no idea that this ’shock stuff’ was more powerful than regular chlorine! It didn’t say that on the bottle I used…”
We took a look at her 3/4-full container of pool shock and confirmed that its label didn’t really educate the public the way we would have liked it to. Aside from a bunch of numbers and percentages that only pool specialists would understand, a more preferable presentation would have stated somewhere on the container, “This chemical is ten times as powerful as chlorine and should be used once a week.”
The young woman continued, “You know, I have this really big bucket of chlorine and when I look at it, I think it’s more than I would ever need. There’s just so much of it and the smell is strong enough to kill even dirty thoughts! Then I look at this really little container of shock and I think there’s no way this stuff is going to do anything. There’s hardly anything in it so it couldn’t be useful.”
Don’t let the small size of the container like this woman did. Underestimating the power of shock and neglecting to use it on a regular basis is the prime reason behind why she couldn’t keep her pool water clear.
In essence, pool shock (also known as an oxidizer or burner) supplies the pool with a super does of chlorine, which is much too high to swim in. Shocking the pool will not only introduce very potent bacteria and algae killing agents, but will also break down chlaromites. Chloramites are byproduct substances that from when chlorine combines and eradicates undesirable organic substances in the water, and are responsible for the strong smell often wrongly associated with high levels of chlorine. This smell is actually an indicator that there isn’t enough free chlorine in the pool. The process of shocking the pool fixes that problem.
After shock treatment, the water should not be entered for several hours until the pool’s chlorine levels return to normal. Filtering the pool for several hours of non-swimming also helps restore a pool’s normal chlorine level. Failing to filter a pool for this period of time is part of the reason why this young woman kept getting foggy water as well. As she continued her story, she told us, “The bottle of shock that I used stated I only had to wait 15 minutes after application before re-entering the pool. It didn’t say anything about filtering or waiting for several hours!”
At this point, the importance of researching pool care couldn’t be more exemplified from this woman’s experience alone. The exact amount of shock needed and the waiting period between its application and swimming will of course vary among pools. The important thing is that you learn from her story and take care to shock your pool with the recommended quantity at the recommended times!
We’re happy of course to report that the subject of our story later managed a fog-free swimming pool through the use of shock. “For two months, I haven’t seen the cloudy water like I saw before. If only I had known…”
