How do you disinfect a well?
Disinfecting a well means dosing its full water system with a disinfectant strong enough to kill the bacteria living there, holding it for the contact time, then flushing it out and proving the result with tests. The traditional route is shock chlorination at 100 to 200 ppm per extension guidance; the newer route is chlorine dioxide at 20 ppm per its manufacturer's published shock range. Both follow the same steps, and both start from one number: how many gallons your well holds.
The steps in brief: bypass softeners and filters, mix the dose for your gallons, pour it down the casing, recirculate with a hose to wash the casing walls, pull treated water to every tap, hold 12 to 24 hours with no water use, then flush outside until a residual test reads zero.
The words sanitize, disinfect, chlorinate, and shock all describe this same job. What changes the outcome is not the word but the dose being sized to your actual well and the result being verified with a residual test and a bacteria retest.
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