We just got a pool recently (salt-water chlorinator), and the advise out there on how to maintain one is just utter superficial garbage. I'd never heard your statement before, and I thought the shocking was just to keep the right level of chlorine. Seems like all the advice is heavily biased towards just getting your local pool shop to tell you what you need to add!

Your comment on ozone made me do some quick searching, and [0] suggests to me that I should also run my pool pump for longer at lower RPM. I'm interested too in how I can minimise the cost of running the pool, which that will help with.

[0] https://aquamagazine.com/service/ozone-and-uv-systems-allow-...

As well as shocking when necessary, just keeping a sufficient level of chlorine can help with continuously oxidizing chloramines. Often when you get buildup it's because the chlorine level in the pool dipped too low. In fact, for a residential pool that doesn't normally see large numbers of swimmers, if the chlorine level is kept consistent (somewhere between one and several ppm depending on things like pool type, whether a salt water chlorine generator is used, amount of sunlight, etc.), shocking regularly may not even be necessary. (We almost never shock ours, and with our SWG running at around 20% about 8 hours per day, consistently maintain 1-2ppm free chlorine, and almost zero combined chlorine (chloramines). Again, YMMV depending on a number of factors, but the key is to keep a sufficient free chlorine level (which may mean boosting it up in anticipation of a large swimmer load, such as before a party), and then yes, shocking if it does drop down too low and chloramines spike.

It's extremely helpful to have a decent test kit, like the ones sold by Taylor. The color-change 'strips' are almost worse than useless, as they can often give misleading readings. The info at troublefreepool.com is also very useful when first learning this stuff.