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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.
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amy1545mo ago
Sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
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the_holly5mo 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.
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ellis.hayden5mo 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.
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