Is it safe to mix vinegar and ammonia as a cleaning product?

First, let’s talk about why it’s ill-advised to mix chlorine-based bleach with ammonia. We’ll talk about urine in just a moment. I know you’re as excited as I am by that sentence.

Bleach contains a chemical called sodium hypochlorite, $m NaClO$ (sometimes written as $m NaOCl$). Ammonia is $m NH_3$. When these chemicals react, they produce a host of noxious products including chloramine ($m NH_2Cl$), dichloramine ($m NHCl_2$), trichloramine ($m NCl_3$), hydrochloric acid ($m HCl$), and chlorine gas ($m Cl_2$). I’ve heard that you can boil the mixture to produce hydrazine ($m N_2H_4$), but that would be a really bad idea. Hydrazine is bonkers toxic.

Of the chemicals that can be produced without boiling, chlorine is perhaps the most troublesome. All the other chemicals are water-soluble. Since household bleach and ammonia solutions are mostly water anyway, the reaction products will dissolve in the mixture and never reach your bodily openings (unless you foolishly choose to gargle the mixture). Chlorine tends to escape from the mixture as an irritating gas. The good news is that you probably won’t produce instant death levels of chlorine if you accidentally mix bleach with ammonia. You’ll notice a stinging sensation in your nose and eyes, and hopefully good sense will motivate you to vacate the area and open a window before the fumes overcome you.

As promised, let’s talk about urine. Healthy human urine should not contain ammonia, although it contains a chemical called urea which can transform into ammonia after a while. (Even if your urine smells of ammonia, that doesn’t mean it’s concentrated — ammonia is detectable by the average nose at fairly low thresholds.) I haven’t done the math to be sure, but I’m willing to bet that the amount of ammonia contained in a healthy human’s urine would not produce enough chlorine gas to cross the toxicity threshold, even if that person peed into a toilet filled with pure bleach.

I’m not saying you should make a habit of urinating in bleach-filled toilet bowls. I’m just saying you don’t have to be afraid of draining the lizard right after bleaching the toilet.

Vinegar and water both are great cleaning solutions. Adding vinegar to the water makes it a potent cleaning agent. With vinegar, you can clean almost any surface, especially kitchen surfaces. To use vinegar in your cleaning solutions, try mixing it with water in different quantities, and use vinegar in different forms. Initially use vinegar in a 50-50% mix with water, and increase proportion as you clean more. You can also make cleaning solutions with a combination of vinegar and baking soda. It is very easy to make cleaning products with vinegar. All you need is vinegar, a container and some drops of essential oil (optional). Here are some examples of vinegar cleaning products that you may want to try.

I think most answers are overlooking the conflict between your word “cleaning” and the implication that maybe you mean “disinfecting.”

Neither chemical is that good at cleaning up day to day dirt, dust, and detritus around the house. Good old detergent and water or even just plain water on a sponge or rag or mop do a darn good job without the hazards and smell of the two chemicals you cited.

Who the heck is in your house and how did they track in dangerous germ loads such that your daily cleaning needs to be disinfecting? People “needing” to use these very harsh chemicals all the time for their day to day cleanings puzzle me.

And for you window cleaning people with grandma’s secret recipe for vinegar water or ammonia water or some magic essential oil water, guess what those guys making skyscraper windows sparkle are using? Water. Often with a low concentration of a detergent surfactant. One even let the cat out of the bag admitting that a light squirt of Palmolive dishwashing detergent was their cleaning booster of choice.