Re: Help, Just bought a house with a pool and chemicals are
That's the level required to sustain a shock process when one has algae or an ambundance of cc (chloramides) that need to be oxidized. Shock is a process at TFP, not a "product" the way they sell it in bags at the pool store. In theory, youu can use any sanitizer (eg liquid chlorine, dichlor, tricolor -- but those last two have cya so don't use them unless you need to raise cya, and cal hypo, which is powdered chlorine that has calcium in it.)
For practical purposes, should you ever need to sustain "shock level" for a few days you'd most likely ge best off using liquid chlorine/bleach to avoid unintended additions of cya or calcium.
If you make sure you never let the free chlorine drop below your minimum, you probably will not need to shock at all. To do that, you will first need to understand how much free chlorine your pool uses in a day on average -- sunlight will burn up some, so will bather loads and combating other organic exposures.heat makes a diffence. Etc. Then you want to "target". Or dose enough so that you don't drop below youy minimum at any time until your next reading and dose.
So for example, if you pool uses up 30 - 40 percent of your chlorine (every pool is different due to location, weather, and other variables) and your min. Is 3 ppm, then you'll want to add enough
to be at 6 or 7 ppm to be safe.
That's why it's important to have a test kit that reads higher than five -- when you account for the stabilization factor of cya, 5 is on the conservative side of dosing. And just so you know, also due
to cya, even numbers up to shock values are safe to swin in, and regular numbers recommended
here are actually in effect not much different than tap water's level of chlorination -- even though
they sound higher ( again, that's because cya causes some of the free chlorine to be held in
reserve until needed...but also why chlorine levels have to be waaaay higher when cya is high to
work as sanitization at all!)
Hope that helps and welcome to TFP! I was new last April -- you'll be amazed in a few months how much you learn here.
So from One newbie to another, cheers!
