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Hey everyone, and welcome to Pool School. This is where we help keep your pool clean and clear by answering your questions about pool maintenance. My name is Matt and I am the founder of swimuniversity.com which is a website that teaches you how to take care of your pool or your hot tub. So today's question is quite simple. How often do I need to shock my pool? Now, first I want to talk about the difference between the actual chemical,  which is called pool shock, and the action, which is called shocking. These are two different things. 

So first, what is pool shock? Pool shock is just a concentrated dose of chlorine. The action of shocking is super chlorinating your water, so just getting the pool super, super chlorinated. And the reason that we do that [00:02:00 ] is because it's like hitting a giant reset button on your pool. All of the bacteria and other things that are living in your pool will all be killed instantly with shocking your actual pool.

What's the right shock to buy? Because if you go to the store and you're looking to buy some pool shock, it's like, which one do I really want to use? Well, the one that I recommend has an active ingredient called calcium hypochlorite, and you want a very high amount of that. So usually over 65% to 70% of calcium hypochlorite is a good amount.

So if you're looking at bags of shock, either at your local store or you're looking online, just to make sure that the active ingredient is calcium hypochlorite and that the shock is at least 65%. 

Now, there are other types of shock out there. there's non-chlorine shock, so shock that, goes in and does what's called oxidation but doesn't actually super chlorinate the water. But that's not what we're talking about here.

So how often do I need to shock my pool? I tend to tell people to shock weekly. And the reason I say weekly is because it's just a good insurance policy. 

If you shock your pool every week, you are killing more and more bacteria every single week. So some weeks. Maybe no one uses the pool or you didn't get any rain and the weather was perfect. Technically you may not need to shock your pool that week, but just in case, why not do that? 

Plus shocking the pool and super chlorinated the water and killing that bacteria and anything else in your water is going to help stave away, problems in the future, like algae or cloudy water or things that can cause some problems. 

But when do you shock? what about during the day? What about in the middle of the afternoon? Do you do it at night? The answer is at night. And the reason you do it at night is because calcium hypochlorite and the chlorine that you use in pool shock is volatile. 

The sun will actually burn off the chlorine very quickly. And so you want to keep your water super chlorinated for as long as possible. And if the sun's down, then the sun can't burn off that chlorine. So I recommend doing it when the sun goes down. You can shock your pool, let it run the whole time, let it run completely overnight. And make sure no one's going into the pool during that time.

Now, how do you actually shock? If you're using calcium hypochlorite then you're definitely gonna want to pre dissolve it, especially if you have a vinyl liner pool.

If you have a concrete pool. You can dump the bags of shock directly into the water, but what's going to happen, what you're going to see is that that shock is not going to dissolve right away. It's going to sit on the bottom of the pool, and I mentioned that it's super high in chlorine. 

It's very concentrated chlorine. Which is like, imagine pouring bleach on your jeans. That's what's going to happen to your pool liner if you pour shock directly into your pool. And so I do recommend that you pre-dissolve it. Now you have to be safe about pre-dissolving. And there also is shock out there that will say that you don't need to pre dissolve it.

If it says you don't need to pre dissolve it, then follow the directions on the bag. 

Whenever you're dealing with chemicals, you want to make sure that you have goggles, that you wear gloves and that you wear clothes that are protecting, but you're not worried about ruining.

You're going to pre dissolve it by always filling up a bucket of water first.  I recommend using at least a five-gallon bucket of water if it's a little bit warmer, it's going to have to dissolve a little bit quicker, but you can just use hose water. You can use the water from your pool. 

Then you want to slowly and safely dump the contents of just one bag of shock into the five gallons of water, and you can use a paint stirrer like a plastic paint stirrer or wooden paint stirrer too slowly and carefully mix it around. When you mix it around, you want to make sure that you're not splashing it and getting it on your clothes or getting it on your skin.

Then once you feel that it's been dissolved, you can slowly pour it around your pool while your filter is running because you want to make sure that you're mixing that chemical correctly.

You'll probably be adding the shock to your pool and it'll be kind of pre-dissolved, but not completely pre-dissolved, so you may have some granules left in the bottom of the bucket. That's okay. Just put some more water in there and mix it around again and then dump it back in. And you should dissolve at least most of the shock. 

So that is how we do it. We want to do it once a week. Again, if you have a really good week where there's no one in your pool and there's no problems with weather. Then you can skip that week if you really want to. But that's how often we shock the pool and that is what pool shock is. 

Thank you for the question and if you want an easy to follow video tutorial and actually how to shock your pool, you can check out our downloadable guide that'll answer all of your questions and that's the pool care handbook and video course.

And again, we have a video lesson on how to actually shock your pool. You could just go to swimuniversity.com/pool and don't forget to use the promo code podcast to get 10% off. 

So thanks for listening to this episode. If you want to hear more, subscribe on your favorite podcasting app. And when you do, please leave a review to help more pool owners find this show.

That's it. Thanks again and happy swimming.