Other reagents

This newsgroup has discussed cooking with baking soda (extensively)
and lye (occasionally...I still haven't gotten the hang of it yet)
with a few references to other reagents such as clear ammonia and
bleach.

I've done the ammonia thing with middling success, but has anyone
tried the bleach method, and what results have you obtained?

As for the lye method...the suggestion is to add one crystal at a
time, until the rock forms at the bottom of the vessel.  Red Devil
crystals are about twice the size of a grain of sugar; how many of
these does it usually take to process a gram of active ingredient?