That's what I'm wondering -- how significant are its irritant properties?
When gasoline spills the fumes aren't pleasant (to most people) but they seem fairly tolerable even at close distances.
Contrast with my experience of concentrated ammonia in the chemistry lab, where if you get one strong whiff it can send you reeling with burnt sinuses.
But I may not be aware of safety strategies that are already in use.
Ammonia was used in early home refrigerators, and people died in their sleep from exposure to leaked refrigerant with distressing frequency. There was a race to design leak-proof refrigerators; Einstein was issued a patent.
Then non-toxic freon was introduced and rendered those efforts irrelevant.
i think it was sulfur dioxide that was the culprit in those deaths, and the einstein-szilard refrigerator was also an ammonia-absorption refrigerator, though it didn't have leak-prone moving seals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
ammonia-absorption refrigerators of more or less the einstein-szilard type still aren't leak-proof, even without moving seals as you will easily learn if you go to a junkyard to find spare parts for one (they're still popular in rvs, and i stayed in a hotel room earlier this year that had one, manufactured within the last decade)
freon was a huge safety improvement over early vapor-compression refrigerants like propane and sulfur dioxide, but ammonia-absorption refrigerators are a different beast entirely
When gasoline spills the fumes aren't pleasant (to most people) but they seem fairly tolerable even at close distances.
Contrast with my experience of concentrated ammonia in the chemistry lab, where if you get one strong whiff it can send you reeling with burnt sinuses.
But I may not be aware of safety strategies that are already in use.