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This is a story of personal experience concerning chemical poisoning and of how fragile we really are. I have gone to the trouble to tell you these things because in all my life I have not found any such warnings anywhere else. I hope that you don't find it too boring. It may save you from an immense amount of misery that you do not even realize is happening to you.
Solder fumes and ozone are psychoactive. Psychoactive is a fancy word that simply means the chemicals involved affects how you feel. It this case it is a negative effect. They don't effect you in a way that you can recognize until you have been through massive exposures as I have. By that time it only takes very small amounts to cause major effects. That is how I came to recognize what had happened to me. Looking back I can see that it was happening every since childhood, I did not recognize it until I was about 40 years old and had suffered greatly because of it. This is also true of many other chemicals that we are exposed to everyday.
You may wonder why no one else tells you these things. The answer is because of money. Other people have indeed made similar observations. Those who did not keep quiet about it got fired from their jobs. Historically there is an example that could not be covered up, mercury poisoning. Have you ever heard the phrase 'Mad as a hatter'? People who used to made hats were literally driven insane due to contact with mercury. Mercury was used to allow a cheap method of making felt hats. The mixture of mercury and animal hair was compressed into hat shape molds to create hats. The people who did the work got heavy skin exposure to mercury.
Eventually there were so many casualties that laws were passed to forbid making hats that way. The people who make the money do not care what happens to the people who do the work. They could have made the process safe but they would not spend 'their' money to do so. I believe that this is also true of soldering and of ozone as I shall explain. I am not in a position where I can be threatened by the money makers anymore. I will tell you these things.
When I was young one of my teachers told me a story of an engineer who worked for a company that designs electric motors. That engineer observed the poisonous nature of ozone produced by brushes of electrical motors. He advised his company that they should fully enclose the motors and pursue safety in future designs. He was a senior engineer. He got fired.
For what I am about to tell you about solder fumes they would fire a thousand engineers a thousand times because they will not spend the money merely to properly ventilate the work areas. There is a new and improved solder that has been developed for that reason. It does not prevent the problem. I know this because I still solder things from time to time. For me it only takes a slight whiff of the fumes to make me sick for days.
You may ask 'How did I recognize this problem?' I have been an electronic hobbyist and technician since I was about 10 years old. I have spent many hours sitting next to a small 15 watt soldering pencil as a wisp of smoke curled up from it. I have always avoided directly inhaling the billowing clouds of smoke that rise up when the solder is melted. Just being in the room where it happens is enough to cause this. One day when I was about 40 years old I began to notice that I felt physically and mentally sick. I have always been strong and healthy. I usually stay well when others are getting seasonal illnesses. And yet, for reasons that I could not explain, I felt so bad it was like I was possessed by the devil. That's when I realized that something else was happening.
The next intelligent question to ask is 'Why are you so certain of this conclusion?'. At that point in my life I had very little money. I did not go anywhere or see anyone for as much as a month at a time. What little money I had was mostly spend on food and on electronic components. The year was 1990. Day after day for several years I had sat around refining my circuit designs. I had tested everything that I had learned in Electrical Engineering collage to the limits and beyond. My exposure to just about anything else was cut off.
I began to notice that my thoughts were repulsive to me. Thoughts of anger, sadness and dispar were occurring more and more frequently to the point that I was in tears for no explainable reason. I began to feel physically ill in a way that was not just from being hungry. I knew that I had to figure out why because I could not go on that way. As Sherlock Holmes said 'When all other hypothesis have been eliminated whatever remains, no matter how impossible it may seem, is the answer'. And so I quit doing the only thing that mattered to me at that time. No more soldering, not even sitting next to an open door as I had been.
Two years passed by. The troubles seemed to have passed. The day came when I decided to solder again. With only a slight exposure I became physically and mentally ill the very next day. Then I was absolutely sure of it. I thought back to the sad times of my childhood and began to recognize how much worse those times had been due to soldering fumes. Most guys are sad about their first heartbreak but not that sad or for that long (years). The things that I had been angry about in my life would not have made me quite so angry if not for that extra push from the effect of chemical poisoning.
You won't recognize that this is happening to you. Everybody has sadness and anger in their lives for one reason or another. It's a part of growing up. You will not be able to tell that you are more sad and extra angry until the problem reaches the point that you get furious over the slightest things and extremely sad for no apparent cause. Then you begin to realize just how much misery you have been through for lack of proper ventilation while soldering.
When I set out to write this it was going to be an addition to my safety warnings about ozone. After doing the load testing on the power supply I noticed that I had become physically and mentally sick immediately after each testing session. As before the testing had been done near an open door which I thought to be adequate ventilation. It obviously was not. After the third session my eyes were burning so bad that I could not bear to look at the computer monitor, my body was in considerable pain and that, how shall I put it, bad attitude was on a rampage. Only the brushes of the alternator were causing this. The loads used were electric irons and hot plates that barely got warm at all due to the low voltage applied.
You can't be too safe. You are in the greatest danger when you think that you are safe enough.