I made a huge mistake… as a kid, I always cleaned my declawed cat’s litter box by taking the liner out and cleaning it with bleach.
However, my current cat isn’t declawed, and so he pokes holes in the litter lining. Just now, I was cleaning it out… some cat litter had fallen to the bottom through those holes, and I thought nothing of it and simply shook the excess liner into a trash bag.
But when I used bleach (previously had used those expensive disinfecting wipes), I noticed something odd… it got very hot and the bleach burned my eyes.
Then I remembered. Cat urine has ammonia. How could I be so @#$#@ stupid?
I went to the trash bin and threw away the litter box as well as all the cleaning tissues and such, but have I suffered any damage from inhaling this gas? (About a minute or so before I realized what happened) How toxic is “very toxic”?
Well, another stupid DUH… should’ve called the poison center in the first place.
Just got off the phone with the Poison Center… apparently they said that if I started coughing and choking, then I should inhale water steam vapors (in the shower) for 15 minutes… thank goodness it turned out okay, I don’t have to call the EPA in or anything, and the cats seem to be just fine…
it’s surprising how hard it was/is to find information on the Internet for symptoms of ammonia-bleach poisoning.
Well, chlorine gas is highly toxic and was used as a weapon (mustard gas) in the trenches during the first world war.
IANAD, butI doubt that you’ve done yourself any permanent damge, reading some other cases of chlorine poisioning, even for higher doses than yours all the symptons have disappeared afer a max. of 36hrs.
Still you should get to your local GP or seek medical advice from a professional.
Yeah, I’m doubting that the ammonia in cat urine is in sufficient concentration to be a MAJOR danger when mixed with chlorine. Maybe if it were A LOT of urine soaked kitty litter mixed with bleach over a long period of exposure to the fumes in a unventilated area.
A guy I knew worked in a body shop and he poured 1 gallon of bleach into a 3 gallon container containing 1 gallon of ammonia. He sealed the top and walked away. In a few seconds he turned to see what was making that cracking popping sound. (It was the jug he’d just filled.) He turned just in time to see the swollen container explode. :smack: He got that stuff all over him but suffered no permanent damage. Hurt like hell though.
I thought that this topic rang a bell. There was a GQ thread on bleach and ammonia here yesterday. The link provided by Philster gives comprehensive information on the various reactions between bleach and ammonia (depending on the amounts combined).
Also note that bleach and/or ammonia should never be mixed with any acid, including cleaning aids lemon and/or vinegar. Same reaction.
Instead of using bleach and/or ammonia for cleaning, you can substitute borax, washing soda, or plain old baking soda. They work as well for most things, and are much less toxic.
Ammonia by itself is a nasty thing, even without the bleach. The glass cleaning fluid I used to use on the copy machines at work had a bit of ammonia in it, and once I spilled a great deal of it and breathed it in as I was trying to clean it up off the counter. It’s a horrific sensation - a very definite feeling of the gas climbing up the nose, through the sinuses, into the eye sockets and to the front of the brain, doing some slash-and-burn along the way.
A live chemist talking here. The BBC link mentioned earlier was pretty close, but doesn’t say much about how toxic.
First off, you can’t make safe materials like hydrochloric acid from mixing bleach and ammonia. You may ask how I can say that. Truthfully enough, the chloramine that you make is more toxic by quite a bit than chlorine gas, ammonia gas, or their considerably safer aqueous equivalents (like bleach or household ammonia) or hydrochloric acid. Ya see, chloramine, dichloramine, and nitrogen trichloride are those kinds of materials that probably don’t have any chronic long term toxicity because most exposure is acute and fatal (in other words, the idiot who mixes the two dies before he can a long term exposure).
P.S. I’ve worked entirely too much with bleach, aqueous ammonia, gaseous ammonia, and gaseous chlorine. No serious problems. However, while I’m often told I’m crazy, I’m not stupid. Bleach and ammonia is a brew for someone with more nerves than I have.
Also, regarding the OP, if you can smell the ammonia AT ALL, there’s enough there to make a more than fatal dose. On top of all that, urea (in urine) reacts with bleach also and at high pH (such as in bleach) will quickly decompose to chloramine within a few minutes. You are lucky you are still alive and still have a home. Some of these chloramines are explosive as someone already mentioned.
AFAIK, you wouldn’t have to worry about mixing any sort of acid with ammonia… since ammonia is itself an acid. And for the second, if you substituded baking soda in place of the bleach, it would be fun to watch.
In addition, I got to laugh at our managers the other day. Someone was preparing a bucket of mop water when the manager told him to add a packet of powdered bleach. The mop water dispenser says “do not mix with bleach”, and I assumed that it contained ammonia. I warned said manager about that, and she replied that she’s always done it that way… there’s no reason to worry. :rolleyes:
As a stupid kid I once deliberately mixed these two chemicals, because the ammonia cleaning product said “DO NOT MIX WITH BLEACH” and I was curious why. I’m glad I tried this OUTSIDE, because the resulting boiling spattering fumey mess dissipated rather harmfully (though I caught a whiff of it, NASTY stuff! :eek: )
As a grad student, when I should have known better, I dumped some ammonium sulfate I’d been using for protein purification into the same sink that we often dumped bleach into (after using it to kill off bacteria). Sure enough, someone dumped bleach in very shortly afterward. Luckily, we realized quickly that something bad had happened (worked out exactly what afterward), and quickly rinsed it all away before anybody died.
Hopefully the statute of limitations has run out on any environmental laws we broke that day…
You must be correct-- IIRC, there was NO cat litter left in the box… maybe some fine dust particles… and the box itself was completely dry! Despite that tiny amount, rubbing bleach on it made the towel got REALLY hot… (sigh)
Thank goodness; I was really lucky, indeed…
A panicky question… does anyone have any idea of the timeframe required to determine if you’re"safe" or not? I believe some poisons are more slow-acting than others… the cats seem fine, all that. Like, “if 36 hours have passed and you’re still fine, you’re safe?”
