AFCI vs GFCI: What's The Difference and Why You Should Care

both of these receptacles look identical but they're actually very different one is afci and the other one is GFCI and while you might not be able to tell the difference just by looking at these those two standards provide a totally different type of protection so between these two GFCI is the most common so let's cover that first so GFCI stands for ground fault circuit interrupt and it can also be referred to as a ground fault interrupt or GFI so if you see a difference if you don't see GFCI or if you hear of someone talking about GFI just know that those are the same thing and it provides the same level of protection it's just referred to just a little bit differently so with GFCI it's designed to protect against a ground fault from occurring so the way GFCI works is it has circuitry inside of it that detects how much current or how much electricity is Flowing between the hot wire or the hot side and the neutral side and if the circuitry detect detects any type of a variance between these two values even a very very small one then it's going to shut power off to that either receptacle or the surface look at depending on how things are set up so the advantage this gives us is it helps protect against electrocution and probably the most common example I can think of for an electrocution scenario would be one in a bathroom say you drop a hair dryer into a sink or into a bathtub well that's going to create a you know a very very high risk of electrocution because all that electricity is running through that body of water and a GFCI is designed to detect this and shut power off so there's no chance or very very little chance of getting electrocuted so because of this typically you'll find gfcis and wet locations like kitchens or bathrooms or even outside GFCI protection can come in a couple different forms one you can find them in a receptacle format like this here which is pretty typical and you'll see these in bathrooms a lot and you can also find and install GFCI Breakers which will protect an entire circuit and one of the things to keep in mind too is if you have a GFCI breaker you don't have to have GFCI receptacles in a kitchen or a bathroom the breaker will cover the protection for the entire circuit so you don't have to worry about having both in place so since GFCI can also come in the form of a breaker you might be wondering well what's a breaker for well a breaker is designed to protect against too much current or too much amperage flowing through a specific circuit so for example if you have a circuit that has a space heater plugged into it and maybe a fan and then you plug in a vacuum cleaner to that same circuit and start vacuuming the floor well it's going to draw a lot of amperage through that circuit and in that scenario that I just described it's probably going to be more than 20 or 15 amps and it's going to draw too much power then that breaker is going to detect that and it's going to shut power off at the breaker itself if that didn't happen then what will occur is that wiring is going to get really really hot and it's going to heat up and it can melt the insulation and it can even catch on fire so a breaker is designed to protect too much current flowing through a specific or a certain circuit and it's designed to protect against that scenario so now that we know the difference between GFCI and a typical standard breaker let's throw afci into the mix so afci stands for arc fault circuit interrupt and these are designed to detect and respond to sudden spikes of power that can occur now this is different than a standard breaker because a standard breaker looks for a buildup of heat and when it sees too much heat being built up because there's too much electricity or too much current flowing through that breaker then it's designed to trip because of that so sudden spikes don't always set off a standard breaker which is why you need afci in addition to everything else that we've already talked about so afcis are designed to protect against a specific type of an arc fault situation known as a parallel Arc so a parallel Arc can happen if you have say a neutral wire and a hot wire that are so close together that the electricity or the current can jump between the hot wire and the neutral wire and that can cause an arcing situation so think of this as like a stun gun for example you can see the electricity flowing between those two locations and that's what can occur if you happen to have a neutral and hot that are too close together without insulation so typically probably a common situation that this can happen is if there's a nail or a screw that goes through some drywall and it happens to Nick off the insulation of some electrical wire inside of a wall well this is a really bad situation because you have a situation where there's electrical arcs occurring inside of your wall and you don't know that that's happening and inside of your wall there could be flammable materials and it can actually cause a house fire now with afci you can also find them in the form of a receptacle like this one right here this is actually an afci and GFCI combo um and you can also find these in the form of a breaker now while afci is great it still doesn't protect against all types of arcing so cafci stands for a combination arc fault circuit interrupter and that provides protection against another type of arc fault situation known as a series Arc so the series Arc that can occur with just the hot wire by itself so for example you know we talked about the parallel Arc the electricity would jump between the hot wire and the neutral wire well with a series Arc basically that means that the power can is trying to jump or it's arcing between the hot wire and another section of the hot wire itself so for example if you have a wire that has a cut section in it then the electricity is trying to make a connection to the other piece of or the other section of wire then that electricity can Arc or it can jump between those two sections causing the same issue the other scenario that's pretty common is if you have a receptacle and you have the hot wire that's tightened down to a terminal but that terminal loosens up or the connection wasn't made tighten up in the first place you can have an arcing situation inside where the wire and the terminal or the wire in the light switch or the receptacle it's arcing inside of the box as well so with cfci it's designed to detect and react to those situations as well so really if you're wanting to detect and protect against all situations that are possible at least that we have the ability to protect against now you really need to have cafci in place to protect against an arcing situation now to protect against a ground fault situation you still have to have GFCI in place but thankfully you don't have to choose between whether or not you want cafci or afci or GFCI protection for a circuit you can actually go with what they call a dual function cafci GFCI breaker so if you want the ultimate level of protection in your home it against any type of a fault or arcing situation look for dual interrupt Breakers and if you install these in your breaker box if your breaker box is new enough to handle these and if you have the budget that will allow for these these will give you the highest level of protection that you can get for your home now that we know the advantages of afci let's talk about some of the disadvantages of afci so first up We Now understand that there is a difference between afci and cafci so if you're looking for that extra level of protection you really need to go with cafci instead of just a normal afci receptacle there are some other limitations here with standard afci receptacles that I won't talk about but just know that if you're looking for cafci you're only going to be able to find those in a breaker form the next issue is what's called nuisance tripping so a nuisance trip is what happens when nothing is really wrong but the breaker or the receptacle thinks that it sees something wrong it sees some behavior that it thinks just isn't quite right and it decides to trip the breaker or trip the circuit in case there's an issue now nuisance tripping is typically with afci is caused by devices that are plugged into a receptacle that are behaving a little bit oddly or a little bit differently than what the afci is designed to detect or think think that it's normal and so what will happen then is if you have devices say that aren't you know certified by FCC then you can have more of a common situation where those nuisance trips are going to occur so if you have a situation where your afci is tripping and you're not quite sure what's wrong it can either be you know doing its job and protecting you against a situation that you're not aware of that's actually a problem say inside of a wall or something like that or it's just tripping because you have a device that's plugged into it that's behaving a little bit differently it's creating some additional noise that the AFC is not you know prepared to detect or handle and so it's playing it safe and shutting the power off the other disadvantage and probably the biggest one is that afcis and cfcis are about 10 times the cost of a normal receptacle or a normal circuit breaker depending on what you're going for so with a typical receptacle say even a commercial grade receptacle you're going to spend like two or three dollars and if you're looking for afci and GFCI protection you're going to spend about 20 to 30 bucks now with breakers on the other hand it's probably going to be a little bit more obvious about how much more of these things are because with a breaker you're typically looking about like five or six bucks whereas with a GFCI breaker or afci or even cafci those are going to range between probably about 50 to 70 dollars per breaker so this can be a significant expense especially if you're going through a remodel of your home or if you're looking at you know building a new construction home depending on what the codes are the electrical codes are for your area so at this point you might be thinking to yourself is it really worth the extra expense for afci and I'm going to leave you with a couple of thoughts on that so the first is I found a study that says there's about 35 000 house fires every year and out of those house fires if they had had afci protection installed about half of those could have been prevented so if you have uh loved ones that you're caring for if you're raising a family and you have more than just yourself in your house I think afci having that protection in your home will give you that extra peace of mind that you're doing everything that you can to keep everyone safe the other thing I want to mention is that the NEC has actually adopted afci as a standard and I'm not talking about just protecting like bedrooms I'm talking about protecting all common areas so because of these two things I think afci is worth the extra cost and at the same time once more and more houses start having afci built into them once these things start becoming more mainstream the cost should go down because of the supply and demand issue all right that's the video hopefully you found it helpful if you did don't forget to hit that like button subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I will see you in the next one

Channel: Top Homeowner

Views: 769,825

Keywords: home remodeling, diy, homeowner, top homeowner, tophomeowner, afci, gfci, afci vs gfci, arc fault breaker, arc fault vs ground fault, cafci, dual function breaker, nec 210.12, arc fault, parallel arc fault, series arc fault, ground arc fault, afci breaker, gfci breaker, gfci outlet, arc fault circuit breakers, arc fault circuit interrupter, gfci receptacle, afci outlet, dual function, arc fault circuit interrupters, combination arc fault circuit interrupter, cafci/gfci, afci/gfci

Id: E3rTqsL-CRU

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2022