Quote Originally Posted by PoolDoc View Post

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.
And I have had similar experience myself on a 55k and a 60k commercial pool. that needed very minimal acid while, at the same location, a 1k gallon kid's "play and splash" area (which were multiple water features that drained into an underground tank) needed constant acid additions because of the amount of aeration that cause constant pH rise from CO2 outgassing. We used acid pumps to automate this but we used a lot of acid in the splash area and very little in the pools. We used liquid chlorine to sanitize and also as shock on all three.