On Apr 10, 7:43*pm, "Danny D." wrote:
On Wed, 10 Apr 2013 05:10:04 -0700 wrote:

The other question is what effect sodium thiosulfate itself
might have on the carpet? *Going back to the acid/base thing,
lye will neutralize acid. *That works great in a test
tube. *But probably not very practical for a carpet.

UPDATE:
I don't have a picture yet because I just now put the test towel
towel in the wash, but here's what I did as a basic experiment.
(I'll have a picture in about an hour when it's all
washed and dried.)

As a very crude test, I placed a blue bath town on a slight
slope outside and started dropping bleach drops onto it, but
then I realized the bleach drops were spreading and coalescing
into one another and I hadn't thought ahead to mark the spots
anyway ... so I got a bit impatient and just dumped about a
cup of the household bleach onto the bath towel.

I waited about two or three minutes (which is about the right
amount of panic time were that to happen on my carpet), and then
I poured an equal amount of white ammonia onto the same area.

I waited about an hour, and, to stop the reaction, I flooded
the whole thing with a strong stream of water from a garden
hose (which turned out to be a mistake as it made the towel
all muddy).

Then, I put the mess in the wash with other soiled clothes;
so it's in the middle of its 90-minute cycle right now. In
hind sight, I should have done a control, but I didn't
think of that at the time of the test earlier today.

When it's all done and dried, I'll snap a photo and post
the results. I guess what I'm looking for is for bleach spots
to NOT show up - but I'll wait for the test results before
making any assumptions.

I seem to remember sodium thiosulfate was one of the chemicals we used
to fix b+w photographs after removing them from the developer. Anyone
else remember this????