This whole “trust Tumblr blindly” thing is eventually going to kill someone, as I became pointedly aware of on one occasion I was making fun of how poorly a particular bleach-based drain declogger was working on my sink and got a chorus of really dangerously misinformed people telling me to pour vinegar in after it because all cute little cool kid diy home care blogs they’re following talk about vinegar like it it’s the big secret the cleaning companies don’t want you to know.
And I cringed knowing that someday, some Well Actually expert who read a blog article once is going to give that advice to someone who unfortunately didn’t take high school chemistry and isn’t aware that MIXING VINEGAR AND BLEACH MAKES CHLORINE GAS.
holy fucking jesus tits reblog to save a life
For those not aware, vinegar is not the only thing you shouldn’t mix with bleach. Bleach is pretty nasty stuff, and if you’re using it to clean, you’re almost certainly using too much of it- the concentration used to sterilize things in microbiology labs handling extremely dangerous diseases is 1 part bleach to 9 parts water.
Besides vinegar, it’ll react with basically anything acidic to make chlorine gas, which includes a lot of household cleaners. Toilet cleaner, for one- my mom learned this the hard way with those solid bleach things you put in the toilet tank.
It’ll react with ammonia to make chloramines, which are also unfun. Ammonia is also a common ingredient in some household cleaners, as well as in pee, so be careful using bleach on really nasty toilets or litter boxes or whatever.
Bleach and hydrogen peroxide usually doesn’t produce poisonous gas (it bubbles a lot, but it’s mostly oxygen), but you still shouldn’t do it, because I had to say “usually.”
Basically when in doubt, rinse the thing you bleached with LOTS of water before you use any other cleaning chemicals on it.
(via ailleee)
