I replaced my breakers and everything sounds better!
OK, this is only partly a joke. My house was built in 2005 and the electrical panel was set up to code for then. The problem I had for a long time was mechanical buzzing/humming coming from it. This literally affected everything I heard in this house. Getting rid of it has lowered the level of stress I feel. Like my mind no longer has to spend time filtering it out. In addition to this, doing a clean sweep of every 120V breaker seems to have cleaned up a couple of other AC gremlins I was having.
Turns out that in 2005, Arc Fault Circuit Interruptors (AFCI) breakers were just starting to be required but only for bedrooms. Well, up until around 2010 or so (based on the online forums) many of these had a mechanical hum that was audible even with the panel closed. Of course, if the panel was in a basement, who cares? But mine is not. From what I’ve read, the noise was no indicator of a bad breaker. Many good breakers hummed.
Fast forward to 2022, where a few things have changed. First, AFCI is passe. Now you need Combined AFCI (CAFCI) with better arc detection, and the National Fire Protection Agency was so impressed with the performance that as of 2020 virtually all residential 120V branch circuits require CAFCI.
But there is good news here too. Modern CAFCI breakers are dead silent. I replaced 18 and not one of them has any mechanical noise at all.
Anyway, my point is if you are living with noisy AFCI breakers go ahead and replace them with their modern counter part, or even upgrade your entire panel to 2020 specs and do them all.
Really interesting to know... Thanks.... Most people are completely unaware of the electrcial noise floor of the house.... Even if all is silent for our ears... This noise is not always audible... I know only because of my own experiments, if not for these , i would have never know about it... It is like mechanical vibrations, an underestimated problems...
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Thank you. Good information.
When I moved into this house 20 years ago… I put in a direct line for my audio system. After a few years I realized I needed to separate my amp to another outlet. A ground loop occurred when I did this. I finally had to put in an additional direct line. It fixed the ground loop problem and significantly improved the sound quality. |
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I alternated using the neutral and ground bus for the pigtails to increase the effective wire gauge...
No, no I didn’t do that, yes, I know what I was doing. :) Having to wire both hot and neutral to the same breaker is what took this project so long. The original installers, not thinking at all about future code requirements, moved all of the neutrals to the right side bus bar, and I had circuits coming in from above and below, leaving me essentially with a rats nest to untangle 1 breaker at a time. I had to disconnect 1 hot wire, and trace it back all the way to the incoming Romex, which were all clustered together. It took me about 6 minutes per breaker instead of say 2, or abour 4 hours for 20. Once I realized that I was better off pulling all the neutrals at once things got a little easier. |
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@jea48 - It. Was. A. Joke. 😂 |
