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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

Bleach wasn’t commonly used for bathroom cleaning in the US ore-covid? It’s quite common in Europe and much of the rest of the world…

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It absolutely was and is. The "potential to produce toxic gases" thing the article mentions is very well known, though the usual advice to avoid it (never mix two different cleaners) was briefly a little more difficult to practice due to shortages.

Honestly I've known about the ammonia thing since college or right after, but I just learned about vinegar and bleach a year ago. If you put vinegar in your laundry you probably shouldn't use the bleach dispenser to do it.

I'm in the US, and myself and most people I know well enough to know this about them have been using bleach for bathroom cleaning for my entire life.

I was raised using primarily bathroom cleaners like scrubbing bubbles and 409. Both of which are QATs instead of bleach.

As an adult I've experimented with using bleach for cleaning, and prefer it most of the time, it's just better.

Most of the stuff in the bathroom cleaning aisle has a "with bleach" version

https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/3189aa67-fa2c-4ad1-ae01-7b6...

Scrubbing Bubbles contains microplastic abrasives.

I worked in a restaurant kitchen in 2008. Every food station had to prepare a sani-bucket with about a teaspoon of bleach in a gallon of water. We used those to wipe down our food stations between preparations. I believe they’re required by US health code law.

The dish washing sink also had 3 basins. Wash, rinse and sanitize. The third had water and a small amount of bleach. Again, required by restaurant health code law.

(I realize after writing this comment you specified bathroom cleaning, but these stories still stand. Food prep environments are held to a higher standard than bathrooms.)

Either bleach or some other powerful cleaner was.

Quite often you hear about some some younger adult working at a low paying job using bleach to clean, and they decide to mix some other cleaner in because it's not working well enough, and there is a reaction that hospitalized them or kills them.

Bleach + ammonia? Chloramine. Bad. Bleach + peroxide? Exothermic reaction that produces oxygen. Bad. Bleach + an acid like vinegar? Chlorine gas. Bad. Bleach + alcohol? Chloroform. Bad.

In short, that chlorine atom really wants to be somewhere else, and nearly anything, even water, will break the bond. So now there's chlorine ions floating around, and chlorine has the 2nd highest electronegativity after fluorine. It's so reactive it will even form compounds with many of the noble gases.

I've worked in a few cleaning jobs as a student in the UK and I've always had to a have a mini induction on how to use cleaning fluids, which is v basic - don't mix certain types of cleaning fluids

Yes, it was always common for cleaning in the US.

I think it was pretty common.

What wasn't common is they many people starting using lots of bleach or bleach containing products all over the place due to covid being though to be spread via fromites in the early days/months of the pandemic.

Ammonia is a common cleaner as well in parts of the world as well.

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