I can foresee where that might lead us. whereby in the event of a fault, the 'licenced control box engineer' will be called out to diagnose and remedy the problem. He will most likely have to have a annual subscription to the company which supplied the control software in order to access the the internals with his laptop. This will be on some 'cloud' or other, with a password or PIN which changes monthly. He will have to be paid up in order to 'reset' any device which has disconnected once the fault has been diagnosed and cleared. Of course, if the CPU in the consumer unit has died, that means a very expensive job.

To me this is a nightmare scenario - there appears to be an overriding tendency to over complicate simple processes to no positive advantage.

'Cloud' means someone else's computer beyond your control, and 'software' should translate to 'nightmare', especially for early adopters.And of course, product life cycles get shorter and shorter, the ongoing provision of backups and security patches represents an expense to the manufacturer and is quickly dropped in favour of the 'Next Big Thing to be released the following year. Witness all those hacked doorbell cameras and other 'smart' devices around the home recently.

Try 'hacking' remotely into the humble 3036 fusebox and let me know how you get on.

"...and the actual death toll was reduced to about a third of that"

 none of it can be verified and proved to an agreed consensus between subject competent folks and the ones who are questioning what's gone on and the claims of effectiveness and success etc are maligned, ridiculed and suppressed ...  :-)

whjohnson said:

and now we intend to introduce fragile silicon chips into the mix

They are here already in other protective devices - for HV and very large LV installations ... and have been for over 25 years.

psychicwarrior said:

and the claims of effectiveness and success etc are maligned, ridiculed and suppressed ...  :-)

Isn't that where this thread started, in respect of AFDDs, though?

I agree, in the grand scheme of things, it's really difficult, and, as I pointed out with the discussion on vehicle safety equipment, there are definitely 'different realities' depending on your own point(s) of view, various 'vested interests' (even if it's only a desire, or encouragement, to not comply with the standard or legislation), the validity we each ascribe to assumptions and statistics, etc.

If your installation has multiple arc faults, then you have bigger things to worry about than how long your AFDD is going to last.

Please expand on that comment.

Z.

The threading on this topic has got terribly confused, so my last post doesn't make sense without context.  It was a response to an earlier post by whjohnson:

I was wondering about the longevity of these things. How many non-arc faults - over-current/short circuit -  will they tolerate before the electronics gives up the ghost?

To which my response was that if you have so many arc faults in your installation that the AFDDs start failing, then the AFDDs failing is the least of your problems.  You need to fix all those faults before the entire installation burns down.

Thankyou all for the replies.

In summary, they meet a product standard, but we do not know how that product standard works in real life situations, or even if it will work at all.

The Manufacturers should be shouting from the rooftops how these devices save lives and properties through their advanced designs, yet we have silence. If they are so good, why aren't they promoting their designs?

It seems there are no peer reviewed papers showing that they save lives/property, but some reports that fire figures may be slightly down, from the USA.

I've got to ask, how did the JPEL committee approve their use without factual evidence?

If they have evidence, maybe it could be published?

If there was some credible evidence that they work, then it would be an easy sell, but how can one recommend, or mandate them with such poor information available to the Installers? 

Maybe it is time for the JPEL Committee to get the Manufacturers to release their testing data to show they work, then we wouldn't be so cynical if it showed they do work, and we could sell them with no doubts as to their life saving capabilites.

In the meantime, I still don't know if, and when, they would work, and have to sell these to Customers, and say they are for their own good, but cannot back up that statement.

But with the R.C.D. test button it tests the electrical and mechanical aspects of the device. (trip coil on toroidal transformer).

Z.

"I've got to ask, how did the JPEL committee approve their use without factual evidence?"

Alan,

I have been trying to ask this question so many times in so many ways but all I get is along the lines of 'No need for you to know that. Trust us, we know what we are doing", which makes me even more suspicious about these things than I already was.

All we seem to get is a swerve back to 'It's just like RCDs were back in the day'.

I say, RCDs are pretty simply devices which use easily understood physics and passive components.

AFDDs on the other hand have a computer driven by algorithms for which they rely upon to recognise the fault and operate accordingly.  These algorithms are pretty much beyond the comprehension of the average bear and are pretty much a black art to the humble sparky. This leaves a serious credibility and trust issue when it comes to adoption and acceptance of something new which might work but not in every instance, or even when it should.

My summary is that I shall not be recommending them in any future instance until they have a proven track record for doing what they say they do on the tin, regardless of JPLE/BS7671 et al.