Should I shock?

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Biologicals - mainly bacteria in this case with e-coli being the big fear.

I was an idiot for not shocking right away...should have trusted my gut that just because the FC was in range and CC was 0 that I didn't need to.

You hit on what I as asking; would a (too) high FC shock level beyond what the CYA could buffer result in the expected fast CL drop and therefore confuse the heck out of me with what's really going on.

I'm relying on the overnight FC lost test.
 
But with that little biologicals in the water, shouldn't the chlorine in there kill it basically instantly? I thought the purpose of shocking was to raise the chlorine level high enough so that it could kill algae faster than it could grow... but otherwise the normal chlorine level should kill any germs or such before it could get from one person to the next, let alone being mixed up in the pool overnight with plenty of chlorine.
 
That though process is what led us to not shocking. But th enext morning I had lost 1.5 ppm overnight which shouldn't be happening if th epool is clean. It's hard to say just how small the exposure was...I have no idea how potent poop can beand I'm sure it varies. From my biology lab days it doesn't take much to start a colony of bacteria and they multiply exponentially so they could overwhelm the FC especially considering that the FC would have already been busy oxidizing sweat and other contaminants after 2-3 hours of the kids in there. So the shock would have gotten us ahead of the bacteria and even if the existing FC was sufficient, the shock would have compensated for what was lost killing the bacteria and provided some buffer and piece of mind. I've been reading up a lot on this if you can't tell.

What screwed me up was that my CYA was lower than I thought so I was overshocking. I probably killed whatever was there the first morning but kept pouring in CL that was being burned off by the sun thinking it was the biologicals I was fighting. I''ve held 15 ppm CL since yesterday afternoon when I changed goals for my lower CYA.
 
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