I think the push for all new builds to be 100% AFCI protected is going too far

After rewiring a 1950s house in Portland last month, I found the existing cloth wiring was still in perfect shape and adding AFCI breakers to every circuit would have cost the homeowner over $2,000 for a problem that wasn't there.

3 comments

3 Comments

amy1541mo ago

Sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

the_holly13d ago

I mean, maybe it's just me but I think that line kind of misses the mark a bit. The whole "if it ain't broke don't fix it" thing works fine when you're talking about a single messy script that one person wrote. But when you're dealing with a whole team of devs working on the same codebase for years? That old code can turn into a real nightmare real quick. Like, I've seen projects where nobody touched a certain piece of code for 3 years because it was "working fine" but then a new feature needed to hook into it and suddenly nobody could even figure out what it was doing. And sure, you could argue that's a documentation problem too, but idk, sometimes a refactor makes way more sense than trying to bolt new stuff onto something that was never designed for it.

ellis.hayden1mo ago

Yeah that "solution looking for a problem" line is spot on. I've seen it too, sometimes you just gotta use common sense and not follow the letter of the code when the old stuff is clearly fine.