I was waiting to add bleach to a load of laundry yesterday, and I started reading the “instructions” on the inside of my clothes washer lid. For one kind of stain, it said to make a paste of ammonia and bleach and let it sit on the stain.
Won’t that kill me? Or at the very least, make me very very unhappy that I mixed bleach and ammonia?
Am I missing something here?
Could it have meant you to mix ammonia and non-chlorine (powdered) bleach? I can’t imagine you’d get a paste by mixing two liquids.
That’s another thing that got me wondering (the paste thing). There was no mention of “non-chlorine” anywhere.
I just went in and looked at my washer lid. It says to make a paste of Color-safe bleach and ammonia.
You might want to re-read it to see if you missed the color-safe part.
Are you sure it wasn’t Borax and ammonia? That’s a pretty common combination. I’ve seen oxygen bleach paste with a few drops of ammonia recommended for fruit stains, but never chlorine bleach and ammonia – that’s just insane.
Yeah, with an oxygen bleach you’d add the ammonia because oxygen bleaching works better at high pH. You would never add chlorine bleach to ammonia because the formation of chloramines can, well, kill you.