I have a salt-water chlorinating pool and it's a swamp. It's about 25,000 gallons, I think.
I'm very encouraged by the photos and results others have gotten with doing major chlorine shocks over a few days. I expect the same results when I'm ready to try that.

I'm in Raleigh, NC ...and realistically, I won't be ready to open the pool until March 1st at the earliest. My pool has no cover (yet..next offseason it will). And it's green with algae and gross, etc. I'm running the pump about 12 hours a day.

So, several questions:

Until I'm ready to start opening the pool, what should be happening with my pool? If I had money for a cover, it would be covered. So that's not an answer this year.
Run pump continuously? or just a few hours? or turn it off completely except when faced with freezing weather?
Chlorine shock?
Can I do the clean-up gradually by dumping in several gallons of chlorine bleach weekly or does that basically do nothing?

Should I go through all the prep work now and clean the pool up to pristine condition because it's easier to maintain than to let it get worse? Or is waiting until March not that big of a deal since it's already bad?

I'm assuming that I'll be spending an hour each weekend to rinse off the filter cartridges for now to get rid of collected algae.

Thanks for any and all help.

--Mike