Pardon me, but I thougt that the true purpose of the AFCI was to protect sleepers from the consequence of plug connected appliances.
There are a lot of embedded assumptions:
Bedroom appliances get physically abused -- as in stepped on or otherwise crunched...
They are very, very, reluctantly retired by the owners -- because the worst offenders are those that provide auxiliary space heating. AFCIs don't provide meaningful protection for corded vacuum cleaners and such.
In which case, the AFCI circuit should've been a NEMA mandate for space heaters. Yes, it'd double their cost, but they're the devices that are implicated in bedroom fires.
The notion that an AFCI circuit will actually protect against a field wiring fault -- an extremely rare mechanism for a bedroom associated fatality -- seems a reach, for me.
Anything that sensitive is going to trip out over an endless number of universal-motor circuit issues. And, universal-motors are everywhere in home appliances.
Just the arcing at a worn commutator would h a v e to stimulate any trip circuit. Arcs are arcs.
This kind of false positive is going to have users all over the nation bypassing the AFCI breakers -- probably by pulling them off the bus and installing a conventional breaker.
