What Happens If You Mix Bleach With Baking Soda?

Some common household items produce strange effects when you mix them with baking soda. Vinegar, for example, creates a fizzy volcano that cleans and deodorizes drains. Nothing that dramatic happens when you mix chlorine bleach with baking soda, but the combination does enhance bleach's whitening power. YouTube user She Loves Science demonstrates this with a simple experiment involving bleach, baking soda, and some dye in a glass of water.

Anyone who has maintained a swimming pool is familiar with bleach and baking soda, because it's common to put both in the water at the same time. Bleach releases free chlorine into the water to sanitize it, and baking soda raises the pH — that is, makes the water less acidic. Pool owners do this all the time, so the combination must not be dangerous. It does not produces toxic gases the way bleach does when combined with ammonia or vinegar.

The weakness of the reaction doesn't stop cleaning experts from warning against combining bleach and baking soda, and that's probably out of an abundance of caution. Because bleach has the potential to release toxic gas when you combine it with other household chemicals, the thinking is that, to be safe, it's best not to combine it with anything. When it comes to baking soda, that caution is misplaced, because it safely improves the whitening power of bleach and reduces the odor. 

Bleach is a whitening agent, and to a lesser degree, so is baking soda. Baking soda has the extra benefit of being a deodorizer, so it makes sense to use them together. If you add 1/2 cup of baking soda to your top-loading washing machine, it will neutralize that strong bleach odor. It will also boost the whitening power of bleach, so you can reduce the amount of bleach you add to the load. You can also combine baking soda, by itself, to laundry detergent to get the same benefits.

A combination of bleach and baking soda also makes an effective household tile grout cleaner. Just add three parts baking soda to one part bleach to make a paste. It's a strong cleaner that can kill mold and restore extremely dirty grout. Before using it, it's important to be certain there are no residual cleaning chemicals, like vinegar or ammonia, on the grout. If so, avoid using any type of cleaner that contains bleach.

You can combine bleach and baking soda in a different way to make a household stain remover. Add four teaspoons of bleach and a teaspoon of baking soda to four cups of water, and you have a solution that remove stains from wooden surfaces and fabrics. Bleach breaks down quickly, so use this solution within 24 hours of mixing it.