Anyone treat a well with bleach?

Done a water test on my well and it's in bad shape- eater has tasted funny for a bit, and GOOGLE says to use bleach, just wondering if anyone on here has done this, and looking for advise

Gottcha one fella said to use at least 5 gallons- its a deep well 300 ft, if that matters

our well is 30 ft deep and 3 ft in diameter ( shallow well)... when it had 15 ft of water in it, i was using 1/2 gallon to clean it out.. ......... 300 ft deep sounds like a lot, but what is the water level ?  A quart or maybe 2 sounds about right.

Edited by steve(ill) - 16 Jul 2020 at 5:21pm

I had an Iron problem with my well and treated it with pool chlorine. The wife wasn’t happy but the toilets stayed clean and the dishes were clean and the clothes especially whites were clean. Lol. In the past when pulling well pumps I would pour 1/2 gallon of bleach in. Our wells are all around 165’.

Mine is only 21' deep a brick well 12' of water. I poured a half gallon in it years ago. It was toooo much. Some where there was a chart for it but it's been years since I seen it.

yeah..i've also heard of people using hydrogen peroxidide too, but don't know how much. one of our #%@&% well companies poured some kinda acid down ours once, we used to have great tasting water, it's been 15 years +/- and the water still has a bad taste in it. found out later that it's a way to let him drill a new well for big $$$$.

Bleach is sodium hydrochlorite, hydrogen peroxide is H2O2. Comparing strength by the typical consumer solution concentration is a bit pointless.

Well driller here does not recommend store bought bleach in deep wells, stated he has access to smaller tablets to drop in at a few months interval that SLOW Dissolve and do not release the typical long term bleach taste/odors, only recommended for bacterial issues not sulphur or hard water.  We have Some Sulphur odor and taste on occasion, usually when waterers are hit hard by livestock but the water tests great just hard so added a softener, does well (TEEHEE!!) By Us!

If it helps, I have some info. from some years back about shock treating a well. If you know how many feet of standing water you have then you can multiple by the gallons per 10' of casing. 4" = 6.5 gallons per 10', 5" = 10.2, 6" = 14.7, 8" - 26.1, 10" = 40.8,        12" = 58.8, 24" =235.0, 30" = 367.2, 37" = 528.7. Laundry bleach rate is 3 pints for every 100 gallons of water. I figure I have about 40 gallons of water in my well and the last time I treated it I used 4 1/2 cups of bleach so I was a little strong on the bleach. I did like some of the other said and bypassed the softner and then ran water back in the well for 20 minutes. I then ran all of the faucets until I smelled bleach at each one and waited 1 hour and then flushed the lines until no bleach smell. Move the bypass control on the softner back to the run position.

I used Dakota Dave's method and it went good.

Do you turn off the cold supply to the water heater when you do this?  It seems like it would take a while to get rid of it if the heater tank filled with the chlorine! 

When I was building, we dumped 3 gallons in one new house and had to run the water wide open for 3 days to clear the smell. Lesson learned.

Where's Les when you need him?

When I had the pump replaced some years back - (first pump only lasted 40 years) service guy used about 4 small pucks or chlorine - said leave it sit for a hour or 2 - then open hose tap and let it pump out for about 1 hour - then open all inside faucets and run for 10 minutes - 
  When I ran a DI water system in industrial plant , every other week we ran a solution of 35% Hydrogen peroxide through all the system but was set up with a metered injector to control % of mix in the lines .
 Had a new guy say he knew how to run the system - got a call a few hours late at home - he had left the mix get into the DI resins - created Hydrogen gas as a reaction - pressure built up and exploded - taking out about 200' of pipe, valves and glass lines around the units . (2 days of plumbing work for 2 men to get it back working) 

I can tell you using plastic baler twine can be deceiving. I was given a box of twine that was a different size than the buyer wanted( he buys it a pallet at a time,box was in the middle of pallet). Nearly full box tied a large nut on to pull it down to measure a well. I sat box on tail gate and dropped the nut and held box. Twine reeled off and just kept going. I had no idea if well was 200 or 1000 feet deep. I stopped the twine pull a bit but no feeling. Let it go and more twine reels off.