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

Understanding Your Circuit Breakers

One of the most common electrical troubles that you will run into is going to be a tripped circuit breaker of a blown fuse.

You should know where your circuit breakers or fuse box are located well in advance and become some what familiar with it.

Do not wait till you have no lights and then run around the house in dismay or panic not knowing what to do. Most of the time if you loose lights or power in one of the rooms of your house you will just have to re-set your circuit breaker or change your fuse.

Inside your circuit breaker box you will see a bunch of black items that look like switches that move left to right or side to side. When a breaker is tripped you should see a red indicator on the left side of the breaker switch itself. Most breaker switches are designed this way, although I have seen some that do not show this and the only way you will know that it is tripped is by re-setting the breaker.

Re-setting the breaker is simply done by switching from left to right, you will hear a distinct click as you do this, that is the point of re-setting.

There are many reasons that a circuit breaker will trip but, the most common of them will be overloading a circuit. What I mean by this is you are trying to run too many things on one circuit. How many times have you plugged in your hair dryer and lost power to the bathroom? Most likely you may have had a curling iron plugged in at the same time. Both of these small appliances are high wattage items and most likely cannot be run at the same time. Another example could be the coffee maker and the microwave in the kitchen.

As you get familiar with your circuit breakers you should label them so you know what each one is for hopefully this will be already done for you, but if not this is easy to do. You can do this with a helper and the easiest way is to turn on a light in the room that you are trying to identify. Then start switching the breakers to the off state. When the light in that particular room goes out then you know you have found the correct breaker for that room.

Usually on the door of the breaker box there should be an area where you can write on so you can identify each breaker, if not be creative and draw yourself a diagram which you or anyone in the household can understand. These tips should help you when the lights go out the next time, and you won't have to panic while trying to figure things out.

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