Ammonia is a great cleaner, straight or diluted. It lifts burned-on food off pans, grates, etc fantastically. But the smell! It’s too cold to clean outside here in Utah so I’ll have to find something else to use, the stinging aroma of ammonia is simply too harsh to use it indoors.
Seconded?
Definitely. Washing soda works just as well and is safer for you and the envirnoment and does not stink. Find it with the laundry detergents.
Seconded. Ditto with vinegar.
I find that a paste of baking soda and dish washing liquid cleans nearly everything. Smells like the dish washing liquid, too.
Hereabouts, people frequently use chlorine bleach to clean things elsewhere cleaned with ammonia (floors, particularly). Say what you like about ammonia’s odor, but it doesn’t linger as long as chlorine bleach’s stench does.
Maybe it’s from years of sing bleach to clean houses but the sting of ammonia lingers in my nose far longer than bleach. Then again, I’m almost always using a bleach cleaner which is diluted and has added perfumes. Closest to that w/ ammonia I can think of is window cleaner w/ ammonia.
I use a lemon-scented ammonia, and my big complaint is always that the smell doesn’t hang around like it does with other cleaners. :: shrug :: I do think the smell of bleach is horrid,a nd never ever leaves until you’ve rinsed it 60 times. . . and then it just starts vaping up from the sink drain.
Ammonia evaporates away quickly IMO, although I do hate when it stings my nose.
I don’t even own any ammonia. I never purchased any. I always find alternatives. I use a respirator when using chlorine and I suppose I could do the same with ammonia. These products can cause serious lung damage. I don’t need to volunteer for that.
I’m with you on the smell of ammonia, although it does dissipate quickly.
White vinegar does a similarly good job on cleaning, and I personally don’t mind the odor at all.
I don’t think I’ve ever cleaned with ammonia or noticed anyone else cleaning with it. Now I’m tempted to bring in some greasy pans to lab to spray down directly from the tank of the anhydrous stuff (in the fume hood, of course.)
I’ve done plenty of reactions with it. I seriously doubt that anything you can buy in the grocery store is all that concentrated.
This is what I use but I looked all over w/ no information found on the concentration. When I worked at the paper mill we used ammonia dioxide and the days they unloaded the tanks were barely bearable.
That’s probably ammonium hydroxide, which is basically just ammonia (which is a gas at room temp and pressure) dissolved in water. A saturated solution is ~18 M (~35 weight percent). The household cleaner is the same stuff, just much more dilute. Wikipedia says 5-10 weight percent.
When someone refers to anhydrous ammonia, they’re probably talking about either the compressed gas or the condensed liquid, not a solution. It’s pretty cool stuff. Boiling is so endothermic that you can condense the liquid in bulk and it will stay in liquid form at -33 C for quite some time.
That sounds really efficient; why not use that for commercial/residential cooling systems? It must be stable to be moved in railcars.
It is used as a refrigerant - one of the first, actually - but it’s rather toxic. You don’t really want to use it in your house.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia#Refrigeration_.E2.80.93_R717
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant#History