lead poisoning from soldering? anyone done any research

[ulysses]

hey guys

i use the standard 40% lead mix solder. i solder on average 1 hour a week.

my wife is worried that i may get lead poisoning from soldering. she wants me to have a blood test to see if i have been exposed.

browsing the web, all the sites i visit say that soldering is dangerous. but none of them go to any effort to measure exposure to risk.

how dangerous is it really?

do people who work as solderers have to take any precautions? are there work and safety guidelines?

ive been on a few electronics courses, and nobody ever told me it was dangerous.

my conscern is my 18 month old baby. she is never in the room with me when im soldering. but maybe there has been a transfer of lead from my hands to her. is it likely she has been exposed? some of the websites i visit say babies that live in the same house with a "hobby solderer" should be tested?

should i be worried? should i go for a test? should i send my baby for a test?

cheers
ulysses

[fixr1984]

Try thebutton.
There have been many topics about this. To many to list here. I think the general idea is that you
should wash your hands when done, before eating, handling a baby, etc.
Some even recommend using a face mask to avoid the fumes. I myself just make
sure to wash up good when I'm done.

[Izzy]

When some fumes go into my system through breathing, my nose starts smelling like some pizza for 1-2 days. strange!

[Meanderthal]

 Maybe I should stop licking my soldering tip to check if it's hot yet...

[R.G.]

how dangerous is it really?
do people who work as solderers have to take any precautions? are there work and safety guidelines?

There were some very detailed studies of this by my former employer, a Major Computer Maker. They were desperately worried that their workers might sue them for damages as a result of work-related poisoning, and equally worried that the EPA or other environmental groups could sue them for some similar reason.

It turns out that unless you actually chew on the solder itself (like I saw one dodo of a tech do once), eat solder paste, or inhale lead vapor from overheated solder, there is probably not enough transfer of lead on your hands to matter to adults. Secondary transferral on your hands is even less. There is actually very little lead in the fumes that come off soldering. It's primarily the evaporated flux - not particularly good for you, but not a cumulative toxin like lead either. This is why you don't find actual protective requirements in any of the places on the web.

But, being an organization pursued by and governed by lawyers, the Major Computer Maker put into place strict rules about lead in the workplace anyway. That way they could show that they were actively protective and completely Absent of Malice.

The real story is that if you wash your hands after soldering, your daughter is pretty protected from lead contamination from you, given only that you don't let her eat the solder nor breath the concentrated fumes as you actively solder. You will hear horror stories to the contrary, and you will find zealots and fanatics that will vigorously deny this, as well.

The lead in solder is not in a form that is easily absorbed by the human body, even as the oxide that forms on the outside of the solder. I have carried three pellets of lead in my own personal body in the form of shotgun pellets since I was six months old, due to an incident in an accidental fire. That's enough lead to kill me if it were in an organically active form. As lead pellets, it's been benign to me.

All that being said, zero lead is the correct amount for babies and children to consume. It might be well to consider your solder as about as hazardous as many household chemicals. You would not want to let your daughter get hold of things like insecticide, furniture polish, drain cleaner, liquid paint in any form.

Using reasonable precautions, washing up afterwards, and not letting children have unsupervised access to chemicals of any kind is good, prudent parenting. The stuff is not as dangerous as, say, cyanide or powdered plutonium.

There is another angle to consider. Some things involving spouses and children cannot be settled by logic. It may be that you need to perform some bit of "protective actions" to ensure that both mother and daughter are happy and safe. Perhaps something like disposable latex gloves, available in boxes of 100 for about $4.00 at Harbor Freight might add a layer of comfort that would make everyone happy.

my wife is worried that i may get lead poisoning from soldering. she wants me to have a blood test to see if i have been exposed.

A test for lead in your blood would likely turn out positive for lead's presence at some level. In the USA, about 100% of people will show some lead exposure due to the years of use of tetraethyl lead in gasoline, lead in paints (which winds up as dust) for the first 3/4 of the 20th century, and lead solder in plumbing pipes which are still in use. It's not big, and it's declining since we outlawed lead in gasoline, paint, and plumbing. But it is there. Soldering is only one of many, many possible sources for environmental lead.

When some fumes go into my system through breathing, my nose starts smelling like some pizza for 1-2 days. strange!

Some people are sensitive to the chemicals in the rosin. It's possible that this is what you are experiencing.

[ulysses]

thanks for you replies guys espicially RG. i appreciate it

cheers
ulysses

[R.G.]

What you DO want to do with a young daughter is to get a lead testing kit and check all of the layers of paint on your walls and trim, cabinets, etc. where you live. Lead paint has been outlawed since the mid 70's, but many older houses and apartments have lead paint that was just painted over. Kids almost always ingest lead from the painted surfaces around them.

[Hiwatt25]

I have carried three pellets of lead in my own personal body in the form of shotgun pellets since I was six months old, due to an incident in an accidental fire. That's enough lead to kill me if it were in an organically active form. As lead pellets, it's been benign to me.

Fess up R.G you were trying to solder at six months old weren't you?  I knew you must have started early but dang!  If it makes you feel any better, my cousin left some lead in me courtesy of a daisy pellet gun.  I was at the wrong end of the, "Let me pump it ten pumps and see if it'll break the skin." debate.  No lead poisoning here.

[jimbob]

Thanks for all the info everyone. I was wondering about the same question. Now I dont have to feel so wierd about how I really like the smell of it! I was worried there for a little while.

[Processaurus]

Thanks for that write up RG, that makes me feel a lot better, I've been wondering about that since both my job and hobby have many hours of soldering a week.

One thing I realized was the way I was probably going to get the most lead in my system is by habitually biting my nails, I'm sure some solder ends up under them through normal work and also the occasional need to scrape off a solder splatter from the solder sucker.  If its not too Howard Hughes for you, I'd recommend using one of those nail brushes when washing up after a soldering session.

[R.G.]

There are not many industrial substances that are skin-absorbed. Some, but not a lot.

Doing even reasonable precautions about not grinding lead into an inhalable powder, not ingesting it, not chewing on it, avoiding lead acetate like the plague, and above all washing your hands after soldering is a huge step toward not getting lead poisoning.

Be very protective of your kids with lead-anything though.

I once forced the folks who built one of my houses to remove and replace copper plumbing that was installed with 50/50 tin/lead plumbing solder in violation of the terms of the contract. It's funny, that.

When I pointed out the lead plumbing solder, they said that it was absolutely not lead bearing, and that they would *never* do that. I heated some excess drops of the solder they used with snippets of lead bearing and lead free plumbing solder on top of a piece of steel with a propane torch under it. The droplets and the lead-bearing solder bits melted at the same time (i.e. temperature) and the lead free solder snippet melted a few seconds hotter/later. I told them that they could replace the stuff quietly, or my lawyer would get some more formal tests done. They replaced the plumbing - and I retested.

[darron]

and let's not forget that the other half of solder is tin! that's not good for your body at all....

an interesting read though (: special thanks to R.G.!

[pyrop]

What you DO want to do with a young daughter is to get a lead testing kit and check all of the layers of paint on your walls and trim, cabinets, etc. where you live. Lead paint has been outlawed since the mid 70's, but many older houses and apartments have lead paint that was just painted over. Kids almost always ingest lead from the painted surfaces around them.

This is a far bigger concern than the minute traces you would get from soldering especially as lead based paints contained between 10 & 30% lead in their day.
I would say that lead based paint would be the biggest culprit for lead poisoning.
I'd say the most dangerous aspects to soldering would be burns & trying to solder when there is 110 - 240volts connected..

pyrop

[RaceDriver205]

Thanks for that RG, a good clear explanation as to why solder is safe. Its amazing that although its safe, the company you talked of still had to go to such efforts!

[MikeH]

It turns out that unless you actually chew on the solder itself

I have a really bad habit of pulling solder off the spool with my lips.  I should probably stop doing that...

[Dirk_Hendrik]

What I miss so far in this thread is the simple remark that lead isn't the poisonous substance.

The bad stuff is the lead oxide which comes with it, explaining the common misconception due to simplifying. This is also the reason that "burnig" solder is more dangerous. The stuff is oxidizing all the time at a much higer rate than in "cold" condition.

In Ancient Rome people suffered a lot from lead-oxide poisoning due to drinking wine out of lead cups. The acids in the wine dissolve the lead oxide and therefore, with the re-use of the cup ensuring a constant supply of leadoxide to the human body where it gets stored into the bones. This causes problems in the joints at a later age. These are quantities far greater than you will ever het into your system as result of soldering. Especially if you wash your hands.

[R.G.]

Let me be really clear here - soldering is not inherently safe.

Soldering with modest and non-onerous precautions to avoid the dangers can be safe.

I don't want a newbie reading "soldering is safe" and seeing nothing else, seeing none of the cautions that make it safe.

Electricity is not safe. Gasoline is not safe. For &deity's sake, food is not safe without an elaborate procedure of growing, harvesting, preparing, and preserving it until it can be eaten. But we all deal with these things by taking simple precautions that have been developed over years. Same with soldering. You have to know the things you deal with, and know how to deal with them safely.

I just keep being reminded of Alexander Pope's comment in "An Essay on Criticism", 1709:

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.

Remember that whole sorcerer's apprentice thing.  Know what you're dealing with, know the dangers and know the ways to do things safely. Ignorance leads to both false feelings of safety by ignoring the dangers, and false feelings of danger if the safety procedures are not known. Either way is bad.

I just remembered another one: "A ship in harbor is safe. But sitting in a harbor is not what boats are for."

The universal imperative here is LEARN!!

What I miss so far in this thread is the simple remark that lead isn't the poisonous substance.

Your post came in while I was typing the polemic above.

We live in a pool of poisonous, viciously reactive hot gasses and aggressive solvents - oxygen in air and water, which is almost a universal solvent, including oxygen. A fresh lead surface only lasts a few seconds while the oxygen attacks it, and makes lead oxide. The oxide is more reactive than the lead, and the one you really want to avoid is the organic compounds, lead acetate being the most common one that is really biologically active.

The Romans also cooked in lead lined pots and use lead pipes for much of what plumbing they had. Wine isn't nearly as bad for dissolving lead as acetic acid... vinegar. Cooking anything acidic in a lead pot is a version of slow poisoning.

Dare I say it - the ancients Romans didn't know what they were doing. All they knew was that lead was not as prone to rusting as other metals, it was easy to work, and it didn't kill you ... at a perceptible rate, anyway. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

[idlechatterbox]

QUOTE:
"What I miss so far in this thread is the simple remark that lead isn't the poisonous substance"


One should distrust simplicity (and the often mis-stated reference to William of Occam). Generalizations about risk and safety are hard to substantiate, mainly because there are so many variables. Are ships safe while in port? The USS Cole was in port when it was attacked, and its being in port is what made it vulnerable.

With ships, lead solder, and listening to 80s hair bands, there is a continual trade-off between risks and benefits. Lead is a poison in any practical sense of the term. Among the things that make it worth avoiding is the fact that it accumulates in the body and is not excreted, as many other toxins or poisons are. In this respect, lead is similar to mercury. But mercury is all but gone from household products, and the mfgrs of lead solder need to get their act together too. Without financial pressure, the mfgrs have little incentive to look for alternatives, though that will probably change as more and more of them are implicated in lawsuits.  For now, the risks (and they seem slight, as others have noted) associated with soldering are probably still outweighed by the benefits, unless we use nothing but alligator clips or quick-release fasteners.

Aside from the obvious warnings about not treating it like licorice, the need to wash hands, etc. there are things that can minimize (not eliminate) the risk. One fairly easy technique is to take a tip from "clean rooms," and make sure that the airflow is drawing the fumes away from your nose. Shooting ranges now do this as a matter of course, and they are in the lead-management business! When I solder, my eyesight being what it is, I usually hunch over the work. I have a mini desk fan about 5-6 feet away, pointing towards me. I suspect that the DIY masters on this forum could go one better, and create a "soldering fan" out of those little fans in computers, since you really wouldn't need to move that much air. I can see where you might put the fan too close, and chill the solder joint, but that's not really necessary if you keep in mind that you only need a slight, slight breeze to carry the fumes and all their evil out of the way of your nose and mouth.

This is just one suggestion, and others surely have better ones.

Nothing is inherently safe, but the risks associated with lead solder can be kept very, very low. As someone else pointed out, the number of people who die of electrocution each year in the US is fairly high, so compared to plugging in the soldering iron, actually using it is "safe." 

[markm]

IMO one is probably exposed to more toxins simply by what we eat than solder will ever produce.
There are more dangerous chemicals in just the coloring of our foods than just about anything else.
Read the ingredients on a package of say, Twinkies and then search the net about these ingredients especially the coloring....
It can be frightening for sure.
Solder is the tip of the iceburg fellas. 

[Ge_Whiz]

Meanwhile, look up the dangers of ethanol - that's really scary stuff.