How to Concentrate Bleach the Right Way

Bleach is a great thing to have. Apart from its capabilities in washing clothes and other household items, it is a very efficient disinfectant. Being quite cost-effective and widely available are added bonuses. The bleach that we can get commercially has a concentration of 5.25%. This is more than adequate for most applications. In fact, you have to dilute it to make it suitable for most everyday tasks. However, there might arise a situation where you might need bleach of a higher concentration. How to concentrate bleach would be the obvious question here. Can it be done? Should it be done? Let us find out.

Can bleach be concentrated?

Bleach is nothing but a solution of sodium hypochlorite. It is purposefully mixed down to a concentration of 5.25% during the manufacturing process. This is done for many reasons. This is the most stable concentration of sodium hypochlorite from a storage point of view. Any higher or lower and it will degrade very quickly. It is also the safest concentration at which the disinfecting powers of bleach are retained. As we mentioned, bleach is purposefully mixed down to this concentration by mixing water. Technically, the bleach can be concentrated more by removing some of this water. However, this is easier said than done as we shall find out soon.

How to concentrate bleach?

In theory, as long as you can reduce the amount of water in bleach without affecting the sodium hypochlorite, you can concentrate bleach. The obvious way forward might seem like heating bleach to boil the water off. This is most definitely not recommended. You will cause chemical reactions that will spew harmful fumes of chlorine gas at an alarmingly dangerous rate. The heat will also affect sodium hypochlorite more than water thus defeating the purpose of this endeavor. The correct way to do so is to reduce the pressure to a point where the water starts boiling at a much lower temperature. The setup required to carry out this operation is usually out of the reach of most folks thus making it quite the impractical solution.

A more feasible option would be to buy commercially available concentrated bleach. This is a bleach solution at a concentration of 8.25%. This is not as readily available as regular bleach but the effort needed to find and buy concentrated bleach is so much more acceptable than trying to be a chemistry wizard.

Should you concentrate bleach?

Most, if not all cleaning applications of bleach does not require concentrated bleach. If you are looking to concentrate bleach to boost its disinfecting capabilities then there are more practical, less labor-intensive and a lot safer ways of doing so. Supplement the bleach with some natural options like tea tree oil, thyme oil, lemon, etc. You can also opt for a specially manufactured disinfectant. These might be costlier but not remotely as dangerous as trying to concentrate bleach by you at home. After all, the point is to kill microbes with bleach and not yourself.