Chlorination

The first occasion I shocked a well on my own property, I got ahead of myself. I had done it a hundred times at the county yard, or something like it, and I treated my own system with less respect than I gave the municipal ones. I mixed the solution in a garage that was…

The hose end went in first, before the chlorine, and I remember watching it disappear down the casing past the beam of my headlamp. It was a Tuesday in October, still warm, and the man of the house stood a few feet back holding a flashlight he did not need, asking me if this was…

Bleach is not the answer to a sick well, but it is usually the first tool. Most wells that test positive for bacteria do not need a new treatment system. They need a careful dose of chlorine, time to sit, and a follow-up test to confirm it worked. The word for this is shock chlorination,…

Plenty of folks figure shock chlorinating a well is just a matter of pouring bleach down the casing until the water smells like a public pool, then letting it sit overnight. It isn’t. Done that way you can coat the top few feet of the column with strong solution, corrode fittings, send a slug of…

Most folks think shock chlorinating a well is like shocking a swimming pool—dump in chlorine until you hit some magic number, then you’re done. That idea comes from pool chemistry, where you add enough chlorine to reach ten times the chloramine level in parts per million. That works for a pool. It does not work…

The morning Carla knocked on the back door, I was filling the chlorine test vial on the tailgate. She had a mason jar in each hand, both cloudy. The one from her kitchen tap had a gray cast to it, and there was a smell off it you could catch from two feet away. Her…