The Arc Fault Detection Device (AFDD)
Vložit
- čas přidán 8. 07. 2024
- All about the AFDD (or AFCI).
Also available in article form on my website with some updated information:
www.dses.co.uk/index.php/free...
Device kindly supplied to me by Electrium following an request I made on Twitter to Electrium, Eaton and Schneider. This is not a paid promotion. - Jak na to + styl
I have shared your video with my learners... thanks for all your hard work great content Gaz 🙌.
Very kind of you Gaz. Keep up the good work on your channel!
This was a properly educational video David. Clear and well designed , brilliant.
I thought that this was a very informative and engaging video. I live in Northern Europe, and have just had my consumer unit changed. The sparks and I discussed the AFDD for the circuit covering the extractor fan in the bathroom for exactly the reasons mentioned. He plans to add one later this week. Now I understand why.
Love the content of all your offerings D.S. also the fact that you think I'm sober😂👍👍👍
I learnt a lot from this. You are a fantastic teacher.
Pure gold - Thanks David.
Just watching the back catalogue of videos and found this gem... DASWACAN 1000... what a fine piece of British Engineering!
Absolutely great video!!!!
Thanks Craig.
Μπράβο φίλε μου. Ευχαριστούμε για την ανάλυση.
Πολύ ευγενικό, ευχαριστώ!
Excellent video... You answered a lot of questions I had about these devices!.. I'm glad these AFDD's indicate that the RCBO has operated due to an arc fault otherwise we would be scratching our heads to why they have operated! I'm so glad they are only a recommendation (for now anyway!) installing these on a retrofit would cause an absolute minefield of problems! Now I've got my head round AFDD's I can move on to Type F, AKV and EV RCBO's and then SPD'S....... Why didn't I become a plumber! 😂
I keep thinking that too - I suspect I'd be richer if I were a plumber!
Absolutely brilliant......thank you
Top vid mate.. Thanks for the heads up 👌🏻
Wow, i love the DASWACAN 1000 makes me feel like everything is awesome
We have arc fault, earth leakage *and* overcurrent protection in one device - everything IS awesome!!
its saturday afternoon here ...and im having a beer watching your video ..;-)....Got really excited when you pulled out the electronics stuff....thought to myself ..cool another sparkie who,s into electronics ...
I like your style and you’re Lego skill. Good man! Thanks Regards Chris
Thanks Chris!
Thanks a bunch. Cheers.
hi David not watching sober as you said.. loved it and think 1.21 gigawatts
Great video! Love the Brexit reference!
Finally an arc detector that actually works.. I'm still a bit dubious tho, thanks for the demo..
Here in America we have standardized the 1 inch breaker that’s interchangeable. So in theory all the boxes can use breakers from multiple manufacturers
Brilliant video David! Great sense of humour too. Would AFDDs work, on say, a lighting circuit with LEDs pulling a few milliamperes? I wonder what the trip differential is? What is the sensitivity? Also, how many milli seconds? I think this new 18th edition regs is the best ever. Real changes rather than the usual rhetoric changes. Good practical changes. I feel the industry is moving forward again after years and years of it being ruled by parsimonious accountants. Profits over safety. Us sparkles have been whinging for years about how shitty equipment is. I think these days are brilliant fresh air! Thanks for the video David!
Thanks David. There's some technical data in the PDF linked here: www.electrium.co.uk/media/20180709153811_0_StarbreakerProtectiveDevices.pdf although I don't think it has the stats you're after (I don't have the answers this end).
GREAT DEMONSTRATION : Ranbir Singh Havells India
Everybody in your neighbourhood is probably angry at your spark-gap transmitter. XD
Knocks Channel 5 off the air every time I use it!
Great video, very informative 👍🏻
AFDD are really intended to stop electric blankets from catching fire. Their wire is the most abused ans stressed and you will be asleep when it catches fire. That's why bedrooms were the specified location in the US. But with ant tech some group got together and said why not on all circuits. Well that's why no one likes them, the other circuits have devices that don't play well with the AFDD. If we could just have struck with the bedroom circuits this would not be the nightmare it has become.
That's very interesting - where are you located? AFDD's are new to the UK, but its great to hear from those elsewhere in the world who have more experience with them, especially if they're causing a headache to your working day!
Some (many?) electric blankets have their own arc detection built into the controller, which seems like a much better arrangement; since that only has to accommodate a specific known resistive load, it can be made far more sensitive than circuit-level AFDDs without nuisance tripping, and doesn't bring down other loads when it *does* trip.
"Everything is awesome! Everything is cool when your part of a team. Everything is awesome......When your living on a dream".
Seriously though, the NIC should pay you lots of money and use this video for education purposes, after asking your permission of course. Well cool!
P.S. When will the DASWACAN2000 be on the market and will it be integrated in metal clad fuse boards?
I've always looked at the way light switches are rated for AC only. Been tempted to whack a big rectifier in line with a 3kw heater and see what sort of mayhem occurs inside when you try and use a light switch to turn it off!
I think JW did a video on this - DC on AC accessories. It ended... with melting... if I remember rightly...
Brilliant Dave :-) At one point I was almost sure you were going to poke your finger into the arc :-)
There were a couple of occasions when I forgot myself and came close!
Fantastic video my man I think the use of Lego may confuse our foreign buddies ( you crazy brits )
Can you let me know how you built that arc creating gizmo. Not the lego one, the man size one. Cheers.
Simply a 10kV neon transformer. 230V on the two terminals in, 10kV on the two terminals out. Each of those output terminals is connected to a prong, and the air gap at the bottom is sized to allow an initial arc to form. The hard part was sizing the gap and the Vee shape of the prongs, but that's just (rather dangerous) trial and error. The initial gap has to be small enough to allow the arc to reliably form every time, while the Vee should be sized to allow most arcs to rise to the top before breaking. Also, had I mentioned that it can be rather dangerous?
Thanks
Very kind, thanks Tony
AFDD's seem a useful device for those who live by the sea then. I suppose we will see you soon on Dragons Den peddling your updated DASWACAN 2000 and salt solution dispenser. Did your kids suggest the Lego - or was it conceived after a few sherbets. Have you recommended the salt solution testing method to JW.
JW said I was cheating for using salt water to force operation of the thing, but it'll be another matter if he ever accidentally spills a bucket of brine over his consumer unit.
You are the lego master. What are we supposed to do if we install one of these afdd and six months later you receive a call say its gone off. There is no test equipment that I am aware of that can verify if it is working correctly, you can't detect an arc fault with an insulation tester.
You would be blindly opening up all the connections on a circuit to see if they are tight and thats assuming you can access them. Surely we need some expensive piece of measuring equipment that gives a bit more than a coloured light to go on.
Great video thanks for sharing
Yes, this is the potential headache with these things. A tester might appear that allows you to inject 'friendly' and 'unfriendly' arcs into an AFDD to see if it's operating correctly, but when it comes to finding the cause of a trip in the wild, testing is limited. You might pick up a series arc location by an abnormal high R1+R2 or Zs test reading at a particular point, and you might pick up the existence of a parallel arc by IR testing (might have to ramp up the tester to 1000V to really catch it), but that's about it. It doesn't help that the cause of an arc is often likely to be an intermittent fault at first too, so it may not be present at the time of testing. Also, the fault may not be on the building cabling itself, it could be in an accessory such as a socket outlet with dust/debris inside or water ingress into an external luminaire, it could be a loose connection in a plugtop, a damaged appliance flex or inside the appliance at the cord grip, termination point or switch (although not necessarily further down the line where a transformer or optoisolator may separate it from the AC input). The way I see it, installing these into new builds or rewires where you know the wiring routes and can trust your work may not be so bad, but retrofit into older installations with existing wiring and aged appliances could be problematic. If a later revision of the regs insists on these for the retrofit market, I would personally consider pulling CU upgrades from my services portfolio, or I would put some wording into my terms and conditions to limit my liability.
@@dsesuk you could introduce a single pulse and measure its runtime to get the distance to the fault
@@dsesuk Is there anyone who makes a TDR meter for this application? TDR meters can tell you the distance down a wire at which resistivity changes, which is going to be everywhere there is a poor connection. They're super common in telecoms wiring, but I don't think I've ever seen one for mains wiring.
@@CoolerQ 25 years ago when I worked for Cable & Wireless, I had a £5k Fluke TDR meter, can't remember the model, but it did the biz for CAT-5. I always regretted not nicking that when I left. I've never tried one on mains wiring, and I'm not aware of one specifically for such.
David Savery Electrical Services I don’t see faults with appliances being particularly difficult to trace. The homeowner will usually make the connection themselves eg I turned on the toaster and it tripped the thing. I know arcs are intermittent but they’ll still generally happen when the load is switched on or switched higher. Like anything experience will teach you the most likely culprits for arc faults.
It would be smarter if AFDD manufacturers could include a "learn" mode where you push a learn button and then you run said machine/thing and test lightswitches and so on that is connected to said Circuit, and then it will learn a threshold so it don't false trip but still trip at unnormal arcing.
Same with GFCIs, Personally I think 30mA is pretty high and it would be easy for GFCI manufacturers to include some "learn" mode here too, where it will Always trip at 30mA, but the "learn" mode can be used to "learn" a lower trip level into the system, so on a good circuit with low Earth leakage, it could even be learnt to trip at like 10mA or even 5mA. And in such a combined device, the "learn" button could then be responsible for both Learning AFDD And GFCI parameters into it.
Or even a fully automatic learn mode where it will during the course of a week of normal usage, automatically learn the "normal parameters" of the Circuit (arc signature and Earth leakage current) and if anything gets unnormal, it should of course trip.
Would be nice perhaps for people who know what they are doing, but you know that some people are just going to figure out that if the power keeps going off they can press that "learn" button to make the problem go away...
why not use an arclamp ?
I recon that bigger ark would be on Natural wire with big load.
Hi there. I love the videos.
One question please, could you recommend a decent cable tracer.
You know for trying to trace hidden cables.
Many thanks.
If you mean one of those things that claims to detect cables buried in walls, then no. No such thing exists. Whatever you spend, and whatever the manufacturer claims, it ain't happening.
I mean a kit with a transmitter and detector. A 2 piece kit. A coded signal is sent down a cable by a transmitter and the receiver picks up the signal and locates the cable being transmitted down. I know fluke do one I just don't know if it's worth the money. Thanks.
I used a line tracer in a video a couple of months ago when hole-sawing. Is that the kind of thing?
@@dsesuk let me watch the video and will let you know. Not sure if I'm allowed to mention brands but the pricey one is the fluke 2042 and I don't know if it's any good.
I would just like to know your recommendation thanks. I'm just guessing you use one on a regular basis.
I liked your video I was serching from long time to see some kind of your content video like your videos on your channel "good jop man"
Very nice of you to say so, thank you!
What about surge protection? The manufacturers appear to be behind. How do I install AFDD, surge protection and RCBO’s for every circuit without it looking like a dogs dinner
I'm glad you asked! I have exciting news about surge protection and a new video will be appearing in the coming days for a product which makes it (relatively) straightforward! I'm putting it together now and hope to have it ready for upload in the next week, so watch this space!
Hi . Would my welder, standard 3 pin plug , in my shed trip this unit in your opinion ? regards Don
I've no experience of welders, but I suspect not as the arc would be on the output side and isolated from the supply just as my jacobs ladder is in the video.
@@dsesuk Hi David. Thanks for the reply. I actually sent that before getting to the end of the video. Good video btw. Gives an outsider a better understanding of insulation test requirements and why it's expensive getting a consumer unit tested etc. Best regards Don.
Will the afdd just cover the one circuit. If so would you need to install one for every circuit
Yes, one per circuit, however look out for new models coming out this year the size of a reduced height RCBO but working as three-in-one devices with AFDD, earth leakage and overcurrent protection built in. Personally, I believe AFDDs are unlikely to see traction until such time as the regs require their use.... if that ever happens.
@@dsesuk ok will have a look out for them. I think they are a bit expensive for what they actually do and if they actually work lol. Need to be a bit more reasonably priced if they want people to use them
All these videos about AFDDs are a little ironic. My fan heater started cutting out recently. Turns out the connection on the overheating sensor was loose and arcing and causing the whole thing to heat up, and trip.
The Eaton is actually half as much wider than this Crabtree unit, not one-third wider. That being that three is half as much bigger than two. Of course, two is one third smaller than three.
Have I missed it or was the way of working not explained?
I suspect the exact way of working is proprietary so nobody will be able to tell you. But essentially they monitor the current and perhaps voltage on the line, looking for fluctuations that match certain patterns seen when arcing occurs.
Very basically there are two coils around the supply which are slightly displaced: the separation between them allows the shape of the waveform to be detected. A micro-controller recognises distortions in the waveform created by 'acceptable' known arcing causes such as the light switch, the drill and so on, and doesn't react. But if it detects anything outside these known parameters it trips the supply.
9.xcbu.sassenburger-weissbauchigel.de/date/arc-wiring-diagram.html
so now i have to coat all my wires with salt water?
Only if you want to see the friggin' thing in action as I spent about two hours trying to create a sustainable arc with the correct signature without success!
@@dsesuk so we need to be lucky that the fault has the right signature, too
So, as a layman here what will this detect in a home if the wires are not run through salt water. Great video by the way
David's fine stranded wires are probably melting and burning away. This means the circuit gets disconnected. If an arc isn't maintained and the circuit is instantly broken it's not dangerous. Like the wire in a plug fuse blowing. The afdd is looking for more substantial arcs that form over a bad and high resistance connection which is problematic for long enough to cause heat and catch fire.
As I am getting ready to make my own D.A.S.W.A.C.A.N. arc fault testing device can you tell me if it is N.I.C.E.I.C.E. approved and where I can have it tested and certified. Oh No I haven`t got all the correct pieces, no flowers and the only lego man I have is Darth Vader
Technically I think Darth Vader will work just as well, but you really do need the flowers I'm afraid.
When i was a kid I would plug in cables with stripped ends and create arcs in my bedroom. I wonder how the hell I never electrocuted myself? Lucky boy!
I made a few smokey experiments myself Justin. I'm sure I would have given an RCD a few headaches had there been one on our BS3036 installation!
Good job. Pity we cannot see an arc that actually trips these clever things. How else do we know they work ? Also huge risk of nuisance call backs with these things !!
ask your electrical supplier, if your on the best tariff, for the DASWANN 1000 tell them you want use a coil under there network to gain free energy
Great video but I was hoping to see the D.A.S.W.A.C.A.N. 2000.
I ran out of Lego.
David Savery Electrical Services The DASWACAN and electric drill are apparently included in the latest edition of the IEC standard for AFDDs.
Thanks for that. It strikes me they are not as useful as the makers suggest.
Well like them or not, as of this week (21/9/2020) the draft Amendment 2 to the UK regs, BS7671 is proposing to make them compulsory for all circuits of 32A and below that are not lighting. @t is the draft for public comment, section 421.1.7 is the key one. (about 2/3 through the first of the 4 parts) You do need to create an account with the BSI to leave a comment, but anyone can do that. I for one will indeed be commenting, that I think this is not a good thing to make compulsory in the regs.
I need to look at the DPC Mike. Strange they're advocating AFDD's for 32A and below - I would have thought cooked shower isolators at 32A and above would benefit more!
21:17 Lottery number generator…..cheers David…just won 3.2 million 😜
I definitely hear some arse arcing occurring during certain parts of this video. The boffins at Schneider havent managed to incorporate air biscuit detection into their units yet.
according to the nic guy that visits me he has seen a schneider version that is just a single module, i cant confirm this as i have not seen any.
The only Schneider ones I've seen are in the Acti9 range and are two-module with arc fault and overcurrent protection, but no earth leakage. I have seen a single module Siemens version in the flesh, but it was for the German market and had input/output terminals rather than the busbar clamp connection we use here. It's the way things will (eventually) go though. I believe a UK version of the Siemens model is supposed to be out in 2019.
@@dsesuk yeah I am not 100% but I think the Schneider one was for a different country, he didn't say what protection it had on it, only thing is they don't work on rings plus if we carry on putting all this stuff in mains boards they will be the size of fridges
@@acelectricalsecurity The thing with rings is you won't get arcing in a high impedance joint to cause arcing as there will be a lower impedance path for the current to take down the good leg of the ring. That said, if there are two breaks in the ring, one of which is clean and the other high impedance, then arcing is a possibility as the current will be forced through the high impedance joint, and so the device will do its job. Arcing could also occur in a spur off the ring which again will be protected by the device. For those scenarios, they do have their place on ring circuits.
@@dsesuk personally, after reading up on them, I think they are a waste of time, there is only one instance when I have come across arcing, it's on shower switches and as with everything if people were not so limp wristed that wouldn't happen.
@@acelectricalsecurity Can't say I disagree with you. Tightening up of the industry to try and eliminate bad workmanship would be more effective than the regs insisting on new materials and devices to lessen the impact caused by such. Prevention is better than cure as they say! A pretend sparkie who does a crap installation job is also the type of idiot who won't know anything about this kind of device, and won't bother installing one even though his rough-ass installation is exactly where it would be needed.
Brilliant
Did you let off multiple 'trumpet's' at 9.18 and 10.47 David? come on own up
Haha! If I had, I would have owned up to it! I put that down to noise on the microphone caused by the sparking (or something)!
Oww. Now I see they have coloured lights they are clearly worth the £100. This could lead to cold showers!
Americans have been complaining about faults and saying that they do nothing actually and a thermal detector in the outlets would be better. But I see the combination afci gfci unit will become the normal as almost all circuits in USA now require afci.
If the Germans have already squeezed an AFDD and RCBO into the miniature RCBO form factor, then they may as well become the norm and prices will drop as production goes up. I have seen one of these mythical devices in the flesh, although it was a wire-in/wire-out as that's what they use in Germany apparently, so a modification to work with a busbar cage clamp connector is what's needed on these shores, but I'm told that's not too far off. At the moment my wholesalers don't know enough about them, so I can't get sensible numbers on prices and lead times, but like most installers, it'll probably be a while before I start fitting them.
David Savery Electrical Services American testing as found that some fires still occur. There was a video online here somewhere about a device that sends a signal when a thermal temp is hit in an outlet or device. Supposed to be cheaper, less prone to faults, and in tests has reacted before the arc flash devices. But, not sure. USA uses different gfci anyway. They have outlet dual function and breaker dual function but I like the RCD covering several breakers like it does here, compared to each breaker having its own gfci like USA uses.
And trust me I never watch you sober
Quite right too.
Correct ppe would be a pair of ray bans lol
love brexit
Denouncing, Are you a little bit of a programmer?