Well, if the power shuts off and that saves me from electrocuting myself, I couldn't care less how much of the rest of the house lost power.

The annoying part is when I plug in some faulty device that is not immediately dangerous and that shuts down power to the whole house.

> The annoying part is when I plug in some faulty device that is not immediately dangerous

Do you mind, re-reading that statement? I don't even understand that argument. You should not be plugging in faulty devices in the first place...

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.

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.

Fault-tolerance is an important and useful thing.

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.

But I would still very much like the protection.

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.

I've noticed the same thing with a cheap lemon juicer in the kitchen. I'm assuming the brushes on the DC motor are the cause.

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...

This nuisance tripping is the bane of my electrican friend's professional life.

"Oh just err on the site of extremely cautious and sensitive. More safety can't be a bad thing."

And god forbid you use anything with a brushed motor, which has sparks in its normal operation

Some OS's have a single task for the whole computer, rather than one per application.

The only real downside is that if your app accidentally dereferences NULL, rather than just your application crashing, the whole computer crashes.

... Sorry, somehow reminded me of the early days of the Macintosh's OS before it was "true multitasking" (as the Amiga kids would love to tell us).