Did I ruin all my soft goods with chlorine gas?

Today I was cleaning a floor drain in our basement, which I bleach every so often to keep smells down.  Today, I grabbed a bottle of cleaning vinegar by mistake and poured probably a cup or so into the drain before realizing.  Not thinking of the chemical reaction, I grabbed the bleach next and poured a cup or so of that into the drain, too.  An obvious reaction occurred, and I immediately flushed the drain with about 5 gallons of water.  

The fumes that the reaction put off were enough to be noticeable throughout our house, and I was a bit lightheaded after getting out of the basement.  I opened a small window in the basement and another half dozen windows in the house.  My wife told me that the smell passed from the house in about 30-40 minutes.

It didn't occur to me until about an hour after I made the mistake, while at the climbing gym, that all of my gear is in the basement.  I've done a little digging, enough to know that chlorine exposure is bad for nylon.  

Any chemists, or just people smarter than me, want to field a guess as to how detrimental an hour or so of exposure to chlorine gas could be to climbing gear?  The basement is pretty large, but the gear was only about 10' from the floor drain. 

Was your gear stored in bins on the floor (worst case) or high up on a shelf?  (Better) 

Worse if your gear was wet or your basement is damp.  

Wash your shit immediately in lots of fresh cold water.  

The bigger risk is trace amounts of HCl lingering in your gear eating it over time.   Get it clean, aired out, and dry. 

Then depends on how much risk tolerance you have.   I’d still whip on it and not worry about it if it’s been less than 24 hrs.  YMMV. 

My uneducated opinion:  You were the canary.  Canary is okay?  Then gear is okay.  

Otherwise, as per Pilate's Rules for Poison.

Soaking nylon products in bleach will reduce their strength significantly.

Bleach and other liquids on rope

Two questions: What's wrong with you? And: How does your wife put up with you?  

Let me get this straight, you mixed vinegar with bleach, which creates chlorine gas and is toxic, opened a window, called it good, left the wife and went to the climbing gym? I think you should be a little bit more worried about the affects to the wife than gear.

Chlorine is very corrosive.

Also agree that going to the gym and leaving your wife at home was pretty bad form. 

Among the more interesting questions this forum has seen in a long time. Can't help, but thanks for keeping things fresh my dude

I let the wife know first and told her to work outside or next to an open window. Probably why the gear didn't occur to me until later. 

Mark: gear was all hanging freely except for one rope in a rope bag which was hanging.  It's OR, so the basement air is a bit damp, though it has been relatively dry the past couple days.  

Tim: I read up on a few sites about direct contact with bleach.  It was less clear of effects from the gas.  My assumption was that exposure of gear to the fumes was bad, just not sure how bad.  

LL2 & the rest: I've made it this far without getting a diagnosis. Not changing that now!  Barely, my wife barely puts up with me.  I did let her know why I barged in to open a window right next to her while she was on a work call before leaving her to potentially pass out and suffocate. She's the smart one, in most areas, so she was in good hands once I left. 

I have washed everything in generous amounts of cold water, and it is now hanging to dry overnight.  Having done a bit more reading, I think given the large space and the gear not coming into prolonged direct contact with the chlorine that the material should still be sound.  That said, older slings will probably get replaced a little sooner now. 

I have a similar question - the little hobbyist nuclear reactor I was building in my bathtub had a leak and the plutonium water got all over the floor and also seeped into the hallway. I told the kids to go play monopoly in the other room and then left for work, only to realize that one of my quickdraws probably got wet from the spill. Do you guys think i can still use it or should I replace the dogbone?

Trace HCL is not a thing. HCl is only around at concentrations, and becomes a salt when exposed to air and has something to react with. Chlorine gas is toxic, but we all survived the pool at the local rec center, and I don’t see everyone walking out with towels partially digested from exposure.

Glad you didn’t take a bigger hit, it can do some damage to soft tissues. 

Another member on here offered to pull test some of the gear, so once it is dried out I am sending a few slings and cord off to be tested.  Will report back with what we find out. 

Cool. Great to have an empirical double check.  My money though is on no detectable/statistical difference from new ones.

But again, you are missing the critical points here...so I volunteer to checkout your wife, lol.  

A few observations:

• Chlorine gas is much denser than air. The highest concentrations were likely in the drain and near the floor. It is also not particularly soluble in water, so flushing the drain likely just displaced whatever chlorine gas was in the drain into the room. On the other hand, if it was flushed promptly it may have reduced the amount of chlorine released.
• One cup of household bleach, if it reacted completely, would liberate approximately 7 g of chlorine. If your basement is 10 ft by 20 ft by 8 ft (which would be a small basement), 7 g of chlorine, if dispersed uniformly in the air, would be 0.16 ppm. For reference, drinking water can be up to 4 ppm chlorine. So, depending on where you live, washing your slings in tap water might be exposing them to more chlorine. That is a simplification, since chlorine in the air can be adsorbed onto surfaces, resulting in higher concentrations, but suggests that the risk is slight. 
• Chlorine gas is detectable by humans at low levels--perhaps as low as 0.02 ppm.

Agreed PRRose, and great info. I will add that the chlorine in drinking water is in a dissolved ionic aqueous phase (I think in swimming pools, it's usually hypochlorite?) which is not toxic at such levels, and the exposure pathway is totally different too - ingestion or absorption rather than inhalation, so it's hard to compare the toxicities (or rope-eating properties) of the two. NIOSH sets a 15-min exposure limit of 0.5 ppm chlorine gas.

Since I'm a loser with nothing else to do, I redid the calculation and got 12.5 g Cl per cup of typical 10% NaOCl bleach. That leads to a chlorine gas concentration of roughly 85 ppm for the room size your specified (btw, for gases, ppm is calculated with vol% rather than with mg/L as is done for solutions). So if the math's right, it's a pretty serious situation. "At concentrations of 1 to 3 ppm chlorine gas acts as an eye and oral mucous membrane irritant, at 15 ppm there is an onset of pulmonary symptoms, and it can be fatal at 430 ppm within 30 minutes" (NIH).
...Anyway, pointless rabbit hole here but the main takeaway is that if you create a bunch of chlorine gas in an enclosed space you should open the windows and stay outside for a good while (and take the wife with you!).

Bharath T wrote:

Since I'm a loser with nothing else to do, I redid the calculation and got 12.5 g Cl per cup of typical 10% NaOCl bleach. That leads to a chlorine gas concentration of roughly 85 ppm for the room size your specified (btw, for gases, ppm is calculated with vol% rather than with mg/L as is done for solutions). So if the math's right, it's a pretty serious situation. "At concentrations of 1 to 3 ppm chlorine gas acts as an eye and oral mucous membrane irritant, at 15 ppm there is an onset of pulmonary symptoms, and it can be fatal at 430 ppm within 30 minutes" (NIH).

Show your work or you won’t get any credit. I honestly want to see your work because I feel as though 85 ppm would have caused noticeable symptoms with the OP instead of merely reaching the odor threshold and being a little lightheaded. 

Just don't mix bleach with anything.  You ;can make mustard gas and that is more serious than anything mentioned above, I'm not going to say what or how, Cl is also extremely dangerous. HCl is hard enough to breathe enough to hurt you as it's so aggressive to the upper respiratory tract. but Cl is easy and one lung full of a decent [Cl] and your done. I worked with these gases for many years and know them all well.

Bharath T wrote:

Since I'm a loser with nothing else to do, I redid the calculation and got 12.5 g Cl per cup of typical 10% NaOCl bleach. 

Bleach is typically 5-7% active ingredient. I don't know of any that are 10%.

Bharath T wrote:

Since I'm a loser with nothing else to do, I redid the calculation and got 12.5 g Cl per cup of typical 10% NaOCl bleach. That leads to a chlorine gas concentration of roughly 85 ppm for the room size your specified (btw, for gases, ppm is calculated with vol% rather than with mg/L as is done for solutions). So if the math's right, it's a pretty serious situation. "At concentrations of 1 to 3 ppm chlorine gas acts as an eye and oral mucous membrane irritant, at 15 ppm there is an onset of pulmonary symptoms, and it can be fatal at 430 ppm within 30 minutes" (NIH).
...Anyway, pointless rabbit hole here but the main takeaway is that if you create a bunch of chlorine gas in an enclosed space you should open the windows and stay outside for a good while (and take the wife with you!).

Clorox is 6% NaOCl. So 250 g of bleach x 6% x 48% (Cl content of NaOCl) is 7.2 g of Cl.

I should have expressed the resulting concentration as mg/L, not ppm, unless I convert the 45,000L of basement volume to weight of the air.

I got 54.799 ppm for 7.2 g and 95.136 for 12.5 g.

I used 24.45 L/mole and 70.906 for the molecular weight of Cl2.

Both actually pretty high if we use the 10x20x8 basement and assume all chlorine reacted and formed gas.