New homes come with new breakers in the electric panel box, some of them will look like the ones you may have had in your previous house and others will have a small colored button and the word ARC printed on the front of it.
Engineers wanted to make bedrooms a safer place, electric blanket fires from faulty or old electric blankets were injuring people and destroying homes. These fires started when the wires in the electric blanket had been bent so often that they would break but continue to operate, this break in the wire created small sparks with the possibility of starting a fire. The answer was the Arc Fault Breaker, and it has been around in general use for bedrooms since 1999.
If it’s good for bedrooms it has to be good for all rooms, or so they say. So now ARC Fault breakers are required in all the bedrooms, living spaces, laundry and kitchen since 2014. They work well at doing what they are designed to do, turn off the power to a circuit, but this can be a real nuisance. Many electric motors have “brushes” inside them making an electrical contact which is required while they operate, unfortunately this creates tiny sparks (which are safe), you guessed it! The ArcFault breaker thinks the house is on fire and trips before the motor can even get up to speed!
If your “plug in” power tools keep tripping a breaker in your home it may be that easily identifiable and very annoying Arc Fault that is the culprit.
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