Soldering safety — by Alan Stummer and Wai Chu Cheng
In this post, Alan Stummer, Repair Café fixer and CNIB Repair Café organizer, and Wai Chu Cheng, Repair Café Toronto co-founder, share their safety experiences when using soldering during Repair Café.
Wai Chu:
“Eleven years ago, when I started the first Repair Café at the campus where I worked, everything went smoothly as expected from space booking to volunteer recruitment to food sponsorship until my boss reminded me that I needed to get a green light from the Health & Safety department. Thankfully, I was able to tell them that we have Repair Café house rules and safety procedures in place. As well, the suggestion of using an atrium for the event was accepted. I learned that it is important to provide good air ventilation for fixing activities such as soldering.”
Alan explains what we need to know about soldering irons and provides some great tips.
Alan’s Safety Tips:
From my experience, soldering is done at least once in every event. I have three rules when using a soldering iron:
1) Don’t breathe in the fumes
2) Always, always wash your hands after handling solder and its flux, and
3) Don’t touch the iron!
For some odd reason to do with the flow of hot air, solder fumes seem to follow vertical surfaces – such as people. I blow gently to break up the flow of the smoke and dilute it.
Most of the solder we use is the old lead based style. The fluxes, if any, are not friendly either as it contains chemicals that you don’t want to get into your eyes, mouth or open cuts on your skin. Do not apply flux with your fingers. Wash your hands right after handling solder. Never, ever eat or drink while soldering.
Sounds silly to say not to touch but that is for other folks. I warn anyone beside that the iron is on and it is hot, about 325°C (625°F).
Best practices:
Use only lead-free solder. Check this out as an example . Without lead, there will still be flux fumes. Do soldering in an area with good air flow, or ventilate the area (e.g. open windows and doors, use a fume extractor).
The danger of unexpected electric shock — by Fixer Tim Murphy
I was working on a digital camera and accidentally touched the capacitor with a metal probe. Unknown to me was the fact that the capacitor stores power for the camera’s flash. There was enough stored electricity that it burned my finger and hurt quite a bit. Later, another fixer explained to me what had happened. As this was my first time repairing that type of item, perhaps it would have been better if I had done some research ahead of time, in particular to identify specific dangers with that type of repair.
(Please note that we don’t accept cameras at Repair Café Toronto’s repair cafés as this generally involves specialized parts and skills to fix them successfully.)
Fact: All metals are conducive to electricity. Picture this: Someone is making toast. The timer finishes, but the bread slice remains stuck in the toaster. Using a knife, they try to dislodge the bread from the appliance. We all recognize the danger immediately. Putting a highly conductive instrument like a metal knife into an electrified appliance can result in electrical shock.
Repairing appliances often involves using screwdrivers and pliers, which like a bread knife are highly conductive metal instruments. This is why we make sure the appliance is unplugged before we use these tools.
Today’s Tip: Keep the plug in your field of vision
Household Appliances with Plugs: Once we have the appliance open, we will often plug it back in to test specific components. Like TV doctors who call out Clear! when using a defibrillator on a patient, I will call out something like “Power On” so those who are nearby will know not to touch the appliance while I’m running a power test.
Unplugging and re-plugging appliances can introduce possible risk as you can lose track – Is the power on or off? An effective way to monitor this is to keep the plug end of the appliance in your field of vision. The challenge is that often the power cord is on the floor, under the repair table.
Best Practice: Use a clamp and a power bar. Secure the power bar to the table top so you can clearly see when it is plugged in. Resist the temptation to use the power bar’s switch as you can run into the same problem: Uncertainty when there is power. To be certain, always unplug the appliance.
