Some countries you have a single one for the whole building, rather than one per circuit.
That dramatically lowers the cost.
The only real downside is that if you accidentally put your finger in the toaster, rather than just the power to your kitchen cutting off, the power to the whole house cuts off. I think thats a fine tradeoff to save $1200.
The bigger downside is nuisance tripping because the breaker doesn't like electrical noise emitted by some device or another in your house. I don't have any AFCIs but I've heard it's pretty common.
You'd rather have one circuit go out instead of the whole house, and if all you have is the one AFCI breaker you're going to have a much harder time identifying what device(s) is the culprit.
I've mostly used them on new circuits, but have put them on a few of my older circuits too. For my small sample size, I've yet to have one nuisance trip.
Yeah I've replaced all of the breakers (to living areas) in my 90s home with AFCI ones. Haven't had any nuisance trips. If I had "nuisance trips" I'd be more worried about my wiring than about my breakers...
I guess you don't know if it's faulty until you try to use it. Manufacturing defects are a thing, but kind of a once every 30 years type thing, so maybe not a big deal to worry about. The reason you install circuit breakers and AFCIs is to avoid a fire in these cases; rare, but worthwhile to avoid.
Of course I should not be plugging in faulty devices. But sometimes appliances that were fine before break down, perhaps some insulation broke down or just the ravages of time.
I would absolutely like that to be safe. And like I said, if it's immediately life-saving, then I don't mind the power to the whole house being cut. But if it's "just" a bad appliance, then, well, I do find it a bit annoying that it reset all my electronics, and I would have preferred it if only that specific outlet was effected.
Also because plugging in faulty devices into outlets is something that ought to be safe. Because with probability 1 it will happen in every house. If the way the house is wired makes the only safe action to shut everything off that's the problem and shitty wiring.
Exactly: it's just like computer OSes. You should be able to run a faulty program that divides by zero or dereferences a null pointer without the whole computer crashing. The computer should flag the error, tell you what went wrong and why, and let you continue with your work and the other stuff going on in other windows.
real downside: many things work poorly on gfci stuff. E.g. A miter saw or welder. I had AFCI/GFCI breakers in my garage per code, but essentially no power tools work with those kinds of circuits.
That dramatically lowers the cost.
The only real downside is that if you accidentally put your finger in the toaster, rather than just the power to your kitchen cutting off, the power to the whole house cuts off. I think thats a fine tradeoff to save $1200.