I have extensive experience in shocking wells to remediate Coliform bacteria contamination and for other types of bacteria caused problems.
It is rare to get rid of a bacteria problem by shocking a well and in reality, it is nothing more than a temporary fix.
Shocking a well can cause water quality problems that are expensive to impossible to correct and cause problems with a submersible pump, the power cable, drop pipe and metal casing etc.. And in some cases it can make some bacteria problems worse leading to having the well production decrease until you must have the rehabilitated and/or cleaned or drill a new well.
Identifying the cause or source of contamination is very difficult to impossible. Once you have a contamination problem you would have to do repeated testing every few days to be able to rely on the bacteriological quality of the water. Bacteria problems can come and go by the hour day week month etc..
UV will not work on turbid water and certainly not on visibly dirty water, chlorine and ozone won't work either.
Thanks for your input. There are government agencies all of the United States with detailed instructions on how to shock wells - which is where I got mine. Most cast their instructions as 'recommended procedures' and none have ever stipulated the downsides you talk about.
Any procedure which can potentially ruin a well forever should not be advanced by our government.
Yep and we currently have a bunch of government employee candidates running around promising all types of things to the ilinformed among us that they say are good for us without a word of anything negative about their policies if they are implemented...
Chlorine is a nasty substance, and the volume required to shock a well successfully albeit temporary is more than enough to harm most everything it comes into contact with in the well and plumbing and the fixtures and appliances it is run through. And then you pump off the well onto the ground.
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Any procedure which can potentially ruin a well forever should not be advanced by our government.
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Yeah, but they do. The Health Department in my County says to remove the 1/4" plug in the well seal and pour bleach down the hole. They don't mention chasing it with water to wash the bleach off the casing, wire and droppipe after words.
I ended up looking at 6-8 different sites that had instructions. They were surprisingly consistent on their recommended procedures ... and surprisingly INconsistent on some of the procedures.
Virtually all of the procedures called out for the same dilution factor - though one of them said that if you had fuzzy parts of determining how much chlorine to use, then you should use more. I don't think that putting high amounts of chlorine is good for the components, as folks here mention.
Most of the procedures tell you to circulate the water for awhile as you pour the chlorine down. This is a process where you take the well water, from the pump, and direct it down into the well hole. The directions also tell you to wash the sides of the well pipe and the other components down in that hole as you do the circulation.
Most directions say to do the wash. ONE direction said to do the wash for 6 hours! I just did it for a couple of hours and by that time the chlorine smell was strong and I felt that all of the sides had been drenched.
We got feedback from many different people and sources saying that this is not a perfect science. Some people said that one shock treatment 'fixed' their well 'forever'. But most others just outlined that we could not be certain whatsoever about the source of the bacteria/turbidity. That if the shocking took care of the problem now, it could re-appear again in the future. That comment is the same as others have made here.
So we have now shocked the well twice, but I don't think that my wife and I will ever completely trust it. Unfortunately. And we don't know what has 'changed,' because all have drank that water for many years now with no adverse effect. I guess it only means that sickness varies by individual - we don't get sick from the water, but others might.
[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] It's always been understood that you can drink a SMALL amount of really bad water, or a BIGGER amount of not-so-bad water and get by. It's when you drink the same water for forty years and it has a trace of xxx in it that you get into trouble. The trace over time becomes a concentration that is stored up in your body, and who knows what effect it has. So the secret to pollution is dillution. [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img]
I had a lady call me one morning saying her husband, 14 year old son and her were hospitalized Sat afternoon after getting very sick after eating out Friday night. She and their son were discharged that morning but her husband was in critical condition in the hospital. He had had recent brain surgery and his immune system was weakened and could I tell her anything about bacteria testing on their well water that they had never had a problem with or a Coliform test on. I tested and found Coliform before midnight Monday night. Her husband had gotten worse and she wanted to know if the Coliform could be the cause. I didn't know but the hospital had been telling her that they couldn't find what type of bacteria and what they were giving him wasn't working, so if they didn't identify the type of bacteria, he probably wouldn't survive much longer. I told her there were many types of bacteria that a Coliform test wouldn't find and named some including heliobacter pulori. That is what they found about Wednesday IIRC and he was treated and released from the hospital a week plus later in very bad shape for some time. I installed and maintained a class A UV light with an intensity monitor before he came home and they did follow up tests until I lost contact with them years later.
So it depends on what and how much of it is in the water if one exposure is enough to do anyone in regardless of their health.
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