• BougieBirdie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    Friendly reminder that using bleach to clean cat pee can fucking kill you and your cat

    I mean, I’d be kind of surprised if it did kill you, but ammonia and bleach mix to make an extremely toxic gas

    • deranger@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      Looking at this article, there’s only millimolar concentration of ammonia in feline urine (mean 118mM, range 16.9-292 mM). I’d be very surprised if anyone was able to generate significant quantities of chloramine gas by mixing bleach with cat urine.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Thanks for sharing this data - it’s great.

        It actually makes sense; if cat urine contained ammonia the smell would be gone once you washed your cat’s impromptu litterbox, since ammonia is both volatile and highly soluble. And yet it keeps stinking - this hints that there’s something else there producing that ammonia by decomposition. (Probably proteins. Cats eat a lot more protein than we do.)

        Note: chlorine gas is the one that leaks from an open bleach bottle, and gives it a distinctive smell. The ones created by reacting bleach with ammonia are chloramines, considerably more poisonous.

      • BougieBirdie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Isn’t chemistry all a matter of scale though? I admit it’s not my field

        I mean, if the cat pees on the rug and you clean it up right away, that’s probably not a big deal. I imagine it’s a different story if you’re cleaning out a hoarder’s cat colony in a poorly ventilated area and don’t dilute the bleach because you wanted something stronger

        • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          1 month ago

          Yes, from my personal experience. We mop up dog pee in the house all the time with hot water and a splash of bleach and it’s totally fine. It bubbles a little when you rinse the mop in the bucket and you can definitely smell the reaction occurring.

          However, I also once cleaned the back patio of my old apartment of a summer’s worth of dog pee on concrete with about a gallon of straight bleach and had to wait for it to air out for about 20 minutes because it was a definite chemical hazard. As in, eyes burning, and difficult to breathe. I started pre-rinsing with the hose to dilute everything prior after that.

  • BoxOfFeet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Stopping a cat from having pee accidents by pouring bleach in their eyes? That pisses me off. I hate it when people treat pets like actual children.