ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area AFCI's and Fires

I think Reno is right on point here. They still have not required that you "shall" use circuit breakers so that is a red herring argument. I can build a house tomorrow with a "Type S" panel.
The GFCI is also a red herring argument because the design specification is a very specific requirement that is easily tested with very modest test equipment, basically just a 22k ohm resistor.
The AFCI is based on snake oil and blind trust. It was mandated before the actual product was even in the field in 1999 code to be implemented 3 years later with the blind trust that they would actually have the product working by then. The product that was forced on the public was really a shadow of the promise. What do we say to those people in the housing boom that bought millions of AFCIs that do not meet the current code? Is CH, Siemens and SqD going to give them a rebate? I didn't think so.
This was rushed into the code based on a flawed premise, with flawed technology and the heavy hand of the governments that accepted this scam.

I would really like to see a survey of homes built 2003-2007 to see how many have defective AFCIs and how many have simply been replaced with a regular breaker because of nuisance trips that could not be resolved.
If you set the "over/under" at 50% "installed and working properly" I will take the "under" in the office pool.

me too, and Vermont could push that back to '99, because we adopted 210-12 that code cycle.

but then, i'd like a lot of questions answered about them that i'll probably spend what's left of my carear wonding about too.

in fact, i wonder if there's any accounatbility of ROP's juxtaposed to specific articles around, because i can recall seeing (because somebody posted it) what was an impressive list targeting 210.12 , maybe even a record one?

seems to me the issue isn't really new technology, it's the bigger concern of transparency and clarity the powers that be have imparting it

we're just left to howl in the ascii wilderness about it...

~S~

He reno
I read the article as it finally arrived. There is a huge disconnect between editorial and the photos from a Peoria, Arizona electrical inspector. None of the photos in the article are related to the article. Rebecca Jacoby's fire has no supporting photos but the story is credible and I have seen exactly the damage described.

On another point I said in one reply that parallel and series arcs don't draw enough current to trip a breaker. 1/2 wrong parallel arcs can draw a lot of current as they often manifest as a ground fault or wire to wire fault. Parallel arcs can cause OC devices to blow at their instantaneous settings. Series arcs are usually around 5 amps.
The illustrations are generally attributed to arc faults but it looks like the article has just added them as window dressing.

It's that disconnect that put me on edge. IMO, both the damage described and the damege shown in the pictures is from simple overloading - not a simple arc in one location.

If I'm right, both are completely irrelevant to the issue of AFCI's, and were only placed there for emotional appeal.

After making his illogical presentation, the author repeatedly implies that sceptic are uninformed, ignorant, or simply mean.

It's a low-brow repeat of the 'global warming' nonsense: unsupported, emotional appeals, personal attacks on opponents, and high-handed hijacking of the governing process.

Nor is mentioning that other issue irrelevany; the author claims credentials in that area (LEED), and probably thinks this is how you're supposed to construct your arguments.

"Science" is supposed to be neither anecdotal nor emotional. We have not had any real evidence for the effectiveness of AFCI's presented - just hype, supposition, and promises. The article adds personal attacks to the mix.

Is this just symptomatic of businesses creating products and then creating the market afterwards? There are parallels. The original deoderants were marketed on the basis of BO, [which does not exist in most folk if they use soap and water regularly]. They are now marketed differentially on their 'sexual attractiveness' quotient, when overwhelming evidence says that scent is not a factor in such things, humans do not have and cannot smell pheremones. Similarly, until a decade ago drug companies sold stuff to cure diseases. Now they market stuff which consumers swallow for future ills we ain't got yet- such as statins/aspirin/blood pressure reducers to lower the chances of heart attack in the future. Gigantic market. Neat.

We are in a marketing hype world and penis enlargement adds have reached late night television. Still snake oil but the TV adds are working as these companies sell a lot of those pills. If it actually worked we would buy this stuff from Pfizer or Roche or some other legitimate drug company.
I do believe that AFCI breakers work and that they can finally protect from series arcs which is usually the exact mechanism for fire causation. A hot connection is a series resistance that has to become a series arc to get hot enough to start a fire. A too tight staple can cause enough insulation damage that a parallel arc can form. AFCI breakers do that job. I appreciate Reno's conspiracy theory and to a point I agree that a lot of the crap we get is just Hype. I am on the fence about climate change and am enjoying the warmest January on record here in the north west. The key is "ON record". We don't have climatic records spanning thousands of years. Clearly the span of a human life is too short to make long term observations of things that happen on a geological scale. Regardless of the tree huggers embracing every nut position there is measurable proof that there is more CO2 in the air than at any time over the last 100 thousand years. There is proof the rate of increase corresponds to the industrial age. OK, but does any of it prove climate change? Well I guess that is the debate. The big word of caution is if the tree huggers are right we might never react in time to affect the oncoming warm period. I have no children so my personal stake in that discussion is almost non germane. Unless it turns my home into a desert I can enjoy the rising thermometer and take a warm winter cruise in the Arctic sea for my 80th birthday. The fact that California has burned to the ground and I can't get any cheap produce might affect my life but hey maybe they will start growing oranges in Manitoba and go to war with the US when it comes for our water.
I guess this isn't an electrical discussion anymore is it?
Back on topic. I believe AFCI breakers work and if I could I would replace the branch breakers to All AFCI, except I need to also change the panel to allow for 22 wide breakers instead of narrow FPE ones I have installed.

It's hard to bring up AFCI's without opening that entire can of worms. I would like to clarify a few things, though:

I do NOT hold to any manner of 'conspiracy' theory regarding AFCI's. I simply don't believe that the case has been made. I cannot think of any other time the code has required the use of a product that has not been yet made (as was done in the 96 edition), or where one code cycle attempted to bind the decisions of the next code cycle (AFCI's again, 96 and 02). That is bad law, however you look at it.

If there's a case to be made for AFCI's, the article certainly failed to make it. If anything, the effect was the opposite: it undermined the credibility of the presenter.

I mentioned the 'global warming' snafu simply because it has now been shown that the advocates were deliberately misrepresenting the data that they had. It was fraud, plain and simple. The behavior is similar enough in the two examples to make me ever more sceptical.

I sympathise with your panel problems. That is why I am puzzled as to the opposition there is to AFCI devices; isn't half a loaf better than none? That, though, is another discussion.

Remember: there are at least two instances in our lifetimes where firms have deliberately manipulated the code process for their own benefit. In both these cases, the crooks were screaming 'safety' as loud as they could - and in as dishonest a way as possible as well. Emotional appeals are, in my experience, rarely in my interest.

Emotional appeals. Exactly, but perpetrated by people who's interest is strictly $$$. Those climate data sets were manipulated to get Gummint grants.
Actually mikesh, we do have full, unimpeachable records of temperatures for England going back to around 1659. These can be correlated for the whole Northern Hemisphere and they show that the world is warming naturally at about one half a deg. F every hundred years. CO2 has little if any effect at all. I fervently hope that is not the case with AFCIs v. housefires stats.
Here's the data showing the trend for the last 350 years, with CO2 % superimposed as the black curve on the data set.
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a7c87805970b-pi

What me worry? [c Electure ].

I am definitely on the side of AFCI breakers only. A device only protects downstream of the cord plugged into it but does nothing for the drywall screw between the panel and the Device. If the device had to be within 3 feet of the panel I suppose I'd be OK with that since it is likely that 3 feet of wire might be visible always. I took to the hype of AFCI pretty quickly since it was a promise to prevent the very kind of electrically caused fires I was investigating. None of the fires I would attribute to a series arc had a problem outside of the walls but always in concealed wiring or in a box with a device. We have been installing AFCI breakers for 8 years and except for a couple of bad breakers the first year or so almost all the problems I have found were errors or faults. Most problems were bonding wires touching neutrals. I heard of a case where the inspector and contractor almost came to blows arguing that the branch wiring was fine and the breaker was the problem. It took 2 breaker changes and some jury rigging with another manufacturers breaker to prove the problem was repeatable. Eventually the nail was found and the section of damaged wire replaced. So my experience supports AFCI technology and I am a convert, Regardless of those experiences I did see a lot of crazy demonstrations using a razor blade and a section of loomex. The demonstrator would use a makeshift guillotine and slice across a piece of loomex. the AFCI would trip and the branch circuit supplying the demonstration gear would not. It was a few years later I discovered the AFCI was tripping on parallel fault using the Ground fault protection. Pure BS and marketing by the salesman yet the breakers were tripping as per the claims of the manufacturers on series faults. It seems there are not enough sparks to make a good demonstration on a series arc.
I expect there is a time coming soon where all branch circuits are AFCI protected in residential applications since by far that is where people are dying. Most of the people dying in house fires are asleep or otherwise unconscious when the fire starts. I would feel a lot more confident that when it comes time to impliment that change that I couls rely on the sales pitch. Unfortunately salesmen tend to push what ever sells regardless of it meeting the claims. It is darn difficult to be a cynic and an optimist at the same time.

It is not the least bit surprising to me that CH would provide misinformation on this subject. The original proposals for the 1999 code to require that use of AFCIs said that the device that they had then (remember proposals for the 99 code were due in early November, 1996) said that they had a device that could do what they now say the combination type AFCI can do. The combo device did not come on the market until 13 years after the first proposal.

I had a number of very heated discussions about the function of the original device on this very forum. When you started to dig into the real information back then you could find out what the original device could do...detect a parallel arc that had a current of 75 amps or more. I was not sold on the AFCIs then and I still am not.

Another issue touched on in this thread was the cost benefit of the device. I did some work on this issue using the same fire cause and origin information that the AFCI proponents used along with the housing start information from HUD. For compliance with the 2008 rule, I assumed an additional cost of $400 per dwelling unit.

If we had 100% compliance with the rule, we could expect to prevent 435 fires in the first year9this assumes that the AFCIs are 100% effective, something even the manufactures do not claim). Based on the expected number of housing starts, the cost to install the AFCIs in all of the new dwelling units would be a little over 638 million dollars. The cost to prevent each of those 435 fires would be a little over 1.5 million dollars.

Even after 20 years (will the AFCI still be functional then? remember they are not fail safe) the cost to prevent each fire will exceed $170,000.