Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

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For casual hobbyists I don’t agree it’s safe (I used to think so though)

A professional is usually working in a dedicated workspace completely separate of a working area, and that distinction alone is important.

Everyone is aware they should wash their hands after working with lead solder, but if you’re working where you live, it’s all too easy to contaminate areas that you often come in contact with.

I remember trying to clean out my solder sucker one day and realizing the sucker was literally atomizing solder. Just cleaning that thing probably contaminated a good radius around my desk.

And I mean you can say “just wipe down the desk”, but that’s where the hobbyist aspect comes in, a lot of people will do this on a desk with a keyboard and a mouse, maybe a carpet, a ton of places for little bits of solder to hide.

They’re doing things that a professional probably wouldn’t do too, accidentally getting solder balls all over the place and stuff.

I’ve decided it’s not worth the risk. 99% of my soldering is through hole components you could solder with your eyes closed.

Most hobbyists are not doing the volume of soldering that any extra work with non leaded solder is going to be terrible anyways. And they’re also often not going to take precautions like wearing gloves and buying a fume extractor for the same reason

Environment is huge. Listen to this guy!

If you're doing this in your kitchen, stay far, far away from lead.

If you're doing this in your commercial building's electronics lab, where food and drink is prohibited, and there are only electronics people around... leaded solder is going to win.

If you're doing this in your factory, where your processes are tightly dialed in and you're moving mountains of product... now you can use either one just as easily, so there's no reason to risk lead unless the customer or application demands it.

Naive question, but isn't it forbidden? How could an application ask for it?

Some of things are exempt from those rules. RoHS currently exempts some medical and industrial devices.

Applications in the military and aerospace sectors are exempt from EU RoHS regulations. Some medical devices may also be exempt, but this is rare. (None of the medical devices I've worked on have been exempt.)

(The US generally follows the same pattern, by industry alignment rather than law. It's actually nice for the US: we get all the benefits of industry-wide RoHS adoption, but with the ability to painlessly "opt out" for any reason at all.)

I realized that I never took precautions when soldering, I mean soldering on my main computer desk, not cleaning it afterwards, not cleaning my hands, and doing it in a closed room without opening the window.

I should be more careful in the future, fortunately I rarely solder and for short periods of time, like 5 minuts just to fix a wire that got disconnected or change a capacitor, so I don't think it will do any harm, still better to take precautions in the future.

I need to research this more, but my impression is it should be fairly easy and affordable to get tested and, if necessary, get chelation therapy to remove heavy metals from your system.

Anyone with knowledge on the topic that can weigh in?

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