Best Color Safe Bleach?

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With all the bleach products available, how do you know which one is best?

In this episode, DirtFarmerJay will demystify the types of bleach products and how they work. Rather than discussing particular brand names and products, he’ll show you the two main categories of bleach, why they work, and which is the best choice depending on what you are using it for.

Watch for an upcoming article on www.dirtfarmerjay.com on the best color safe bleaches.

Warning - there’s a bit of chemistry class here! Bleach is a common household item found in most homes. Bleach does its work of whitening fabrics and removing stains via a chemical reaction. A stain itself is composed of chains of molecules. Bleach breaks down the stain (an undesirable color or marking) into micro-particles that can then be washed away.

Household bleach falls into two categories - chlorine and peroxide. Chlorine bleach has been around longer as peroxide bleach started being offered in the 1950’s.

What most of us think of as bleach (a VERY well-known brand is Clorox®) is typically the chlorine type. Chlorine bleach is cheap to make and is well-known for its highly effective whitening and disinfecting abilities. Chlorine type products are used for disinfectant products, swimming pool treatments, to lighten paper and wood, and for laundry.

It works well with either warm or hot water, and not only whitens, but disinfects, due to its strong chemical properties that act upon organisms and chemical molecules. In fact, chlorine bleach is widely touted as a disinfectant (something that is not true for peroxide type bleaches). However, these characteristics come at a price, including fading or bleaching colored garments, or weakening the fabric of your laundry load.

That leads us to peroxide bleach.

Although hydrogen peroxide does have disinfecting qualities, they are not as strong as chlorine bleach. Even so, they are significant enough to be used for medicinal, antibacterial, and water treatment purposes. And, because of their chemical composition, after they have done their work, the remaining product is water. How cool is that?

But what about in the laundry? Peroxide bleach offers other advantages - including not bleaching most colored fabrics, nor degrading them. These bleaches also come in both liquid and powder forms under various brand names. Because of peroxide-related compounds in these various products, they are known as “oxygen bleaches.”

Peroxide bleaches “play well” with “color safe” laundry detergents. The bleach is usually added directly to the detergent in the machine’s dispenser tray. The peroxide bleach “boosts” the performance of the detergent, without reducing vibrancy of colors.

There are a few downsides to peroxide bleach. First, hydrogen peroxide is more expensive to make than sodium hypochlorite (chlorine) bleach, so the end product is more expensive too. Peroxide bleach does not work well with cold or warm water. It performs much better in hot water. For this reason, peroxide bleach is used more in Europe, where laundry machines commonly have water heating elements in them.

So, there you have it! For disinfecting and for whites, chlorine bleach is a good choice. Even some colored fabrics (depending on the type of fabric and how they are colored) can be laundered with diluted bleach solution. When laundering colors, peroxide bleach, used as a booster for your detergent, is a great way to go. And now you know why!

If you’d like to know more about how chlorine bleach is made and its uses, be sure to check out:

http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Bleach.html

To learn more about the uses of “common” bleach and peroxide bleach, visit:

https://www.clorox.com/how-to/laundry-basics/bleach-101/the-difference-between-color-safe-and-non-color-safe-bleach/

Thanks for watching! Now, you can choose the best type of product for your laundry and get great results. You’ve just become more self-reliant, and this is just another area where you can JUST DO IT YOURSELF!

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