AFCI Circuit Breakers - Is Technology Making Us Less Competent?
Automobile maintenance got too complex for most do-it-yourselfers. The same has been happening with some home repairs. With home electrical, it just got trickier -- with the requirement of "arc-fault protection" for most areas of the house.
An arc-fault circuit interrupter (AFCI) is a special circuit breaker in your electrical panel designed to sense arcing (sparking) that might present a fire hazard.
These have been required for bedroom areas of homes built since 2002. Beginning in 2008 they are also required to cover most other areas -- except those that must already have ground-fault (GFCI) protection. Because AFCI devices have some ground-fault sensing also built into them, it looks like the AFCI is the wave of the future in home electrical safety technology, perhaps replacing GFCI devices as well as regular breakers.
Should you welcome this as a good safety net, or do you wonder if it is part of a sticky spider web, brought to you by manufacturers, insurance companies, and regulatory engineers? I won't answer that for you or try to give statistics. What I will do here is point out what a homeowner is up against if one of these new breakers should happen to trip off.
Standard old fuses and circuit breakers would blow or trip for three possible causes.
Two of these were common and familiar to most people:
1. Either electrical usage was excessive (an overload)...
2. Or current was trying to get way out of control from wires faulting (a "short").
Many homeowners could handle the troubleshooting needed to solve these conditions. (The third problem has to do with poor connections right at the fuse or breaker, which overheat it and make it blow when it wouldn't otherwise.)
An arc-fault breaker will trip for any of these same problems, but in addition it will trip for some ground-faults and for arc-faults.
If an AFCI trips, how will you know what sort of cause you are looking for? Will you have to become more dependent on professionals from the industries that dreamed these things up?
In general and in a nutshell:
*An overload (or an overheating breaker) will correspond to heavier usage;
*A short or ground-fault will tend to continue to trip the AFCI very soon after you reset it;
*An arc-fault will tend not to repeat the tripping soon, since the conditions for an arc to get going do not often persist after the arc is stopped by the tripping.
If an arcing condition does exist somewhere on such an AFCI circuit, you may have to put up with the nuisance of the occasional tripping, till it goes away or is solved. But do not get freaked, as if something is going to start a fire.
That is the whole point of these AFCIs -- no such fire will have a chance to start.
And that is the point of many products in our life today -- after hazards have been publicized enough, we will comfort ourselves by buying these things that seem to foolproof life. I hope we are not fools in the process.
Larry Dimock is The Circuit Detective, a master electrician and electrical troubleshooting contractor in the state of Washington. His website is filled with home electrical troubleshooting information and tips. He also gives advice from there, to homeowners around the country, on their specific circuit problems. See http://www.thecircuitdetective.com
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