Bleach Prepping? Yes, Please!

Bleach. We’re talking the common household variety, about $2.50 a gallon at the nearest big box store. More formally, sodium hypochlorite dilute solution (usually 5.25%, although ‘household bleach’ varieties range from 3-6% solutions). In chem-speak, it’s a potent oxidizing agent.

Prepper uses for bleach

Potent oxidizing agents Love to react with other organic compounds. They interact kind of like three-year olds interact with cheap toys too, breaking most everything they contact. That property can be very handy, with uses not limited to:

Clean water: Killing most organisms that inhabit water, making it much safer to drink. A quarter teaspoon per gallon, followed by a one hour sit time before consumption, is what Washington State’s public health people recommend. This will destroy bacteria, most viruses, and many other nasties. Cryptosporidium (a parasitic protozoan) is not reliably removed, but hundreds of other things are. It does taste nasty, but I’d absolutely take that over water-borne diarrheal disease.

Disinifect surfaces: For casual cleanups, such as making a table in the laundry room a suitable place to pack up bandages and other first-aid supplies, one tablespoon per gallon is fine. For washing a surface you suspect is contaminated with someone’s body fluids that you don’t wish to share, 1 part bleach to 9 parts water will do.

This wash is even used to clean up nerve agent spills (evidence that it doesn’t leave much behind). A water rinse is suggested afterwards; at that concentration bleach can corrode metal. 

Pro tip: Bleach is extremely effective against viruses that coat themselves with lipid membrane to better hide from immune systems. The coronavirus circulating as I write this and other coronaviruses like causative agents for SARS, MERS, and colds are all quite nicely removed by a bleach disinfection.

Eczema treatment: Very dilute solutions, 1 part household bleach to 99 parts water, reduces the irritation of common skin inflammations/rashes known as eczema. Keep in mind that when it comes to chemistry, more is not better.

…and it even brightens laundry and can be used for cleaning, in dilute solution.

Don’t Go Here:

Bleach + acids –> Chlorine gas. You know, the kind that corrodes lungs. Pro tip:  Vinegar is an acid solution, so don’t mix your cleaners.

Bleach + ammonia –> a variety of noxious, lung-irritating chloramine compounds. One of them is even a shock sensitive explosive. Did you ever think about what happens when a shock sensitive explosive forms around a screw-on cap?

I don’t *think* a spill of ammonia mixing with a spill of bleach would make enough of that to cause a big bang, but I recommend you join me in not finding out by never mixing the two, or even storing them near one another.

Bleach fumes can be irritating to lungs. This is more true at higher concentrations and  more true of people with sketchy lung function to start with (such as asthmatics).

Ventilating the space where you use it is always recommended. If you’re washing down a room to decontaminate it, I’d suggest leaving it open to circulation for a while before re-inhabiting. An open window to the outside is best. Few germs just wander in windows anyway.

Pro Tips: 

Sodium hypochlorite will naturally degrade, and one gallon goes a long way and costs $2.50, for heaven’s sake. Just date the bottle with a marker when you buy it and replace it once a year.  Old stuff is fine for laundry (oh the drama! My whites didn’t whiten quite as much as expected!) but you can no longer gauge amounts well enough to trust disinfection.

The degradation is quicker if exposed to sunlight or high heat. Dark basements are fine — it’s not like you’re going to grow any fungus in there.

Edited to add:

There was a question on if one could freeze bleach. Of course one can; you can freeze anything. But is it a good idea? Based on its composition, I suspect (but don’t know) that it wouldn’t hurt the function of bleach to freeze and thaw at least once. Multiple freeze thaw cycles do degrade many solutions, so that is not recommended.  

I did have one concern though:  

When you freeze some solutions (soda and lemonade are examples), the ice crystals will start to form first, leaving a super-concentrated solution beneath.  That too eventually freezes, but it will also thaw out before the rest of the solution. Concentrated solutions of sodium hypochlorite are aggressive oxidizing agents and make bad house guests.

So I froze a small amount of bleach to see if it followed this pattern.  Here’s what resulted: 

Although most of the bleach froze, a small amount of liquid remained after several hours. I suspect this is a highly concentrated solution, but I’m not going to play with it to find out.

A small amount of fluid in the bottom resisted freezing. I suspect this to be a concentrated solution of sodium hypochlorite. That’s a nasty oxidizer. Once the whole batch thawed and re-mixed, it should be fine again. I won’t be trying to keep frozen bleach though, because I don’t like the risk/reward benefit of keeping a potentially aggressive oxidizer sitting around.

Paranoid Prepper’s suggestion of just using solid granules of pool shock for longer term storage is much better, and doesn’t take up freezer space. Just make sure the pool shock you choose doesn’t have a bunch of extra additives.

NOTE: An older article on bleach (replaced by this one) had the following good comment, so I thought I would bring it forward).

Paranoid Prepper: “If you want a solid I suggest HTH (pool shock) instead.”