I hid Waterbear's post yesterday, so we could discuss it; we don't quite agree. Unfortunately, when we tried to check with an authority, we got conflicting answers, so it's still not quite resolved.

What we agree on, is this: you will NOT have to do nearly as much pH adjustment if you use bleach, whether 6% household bleach or 10 - 15% commercial bleach, as you would with more common forms of chlorine such as dichlor powder or trichlor tabs or granules.

Contrary to what most pool stores (and pool operator training programs) teach, in actual practice, bleach requires very, very little pH 'compensation'

I actually operated one very large commercial pool (about 350,000 gallons) for THREE YEARS without using ANY acid at all.