Donresquecaptain19 I think mentioned a place where if you run EMT conduit for the whole circuit you can skip AFCIs.
He has mentioned before, perhaps where he lives or works, that the area will let you skip installing afci's if you have a sprinkler system. I believe he also said that a sprinkler system was roughly three times the cost of afci Breakers, but I'm thinking that somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000, and if I were buying a new $250,000 house, I'd rather pay 251 or 252k for it and have it sprinkled with no AFCI breakers.
The problem there is that sprinklers aren't sexy, and furthermore they're not required. I would think that many insurance companies would give discounts for sprinkled residences that would more than offset their installation cost over a decade or so.
If I remember correctly, passive fire protection falls into three categories... compartmentalization, annunciation / detection, and suppression. Without any type of suppression, IE sprinklers, if a fire, of any origin, starts and spreads, you are SOL.
Here, you can't build a deck more than two feet off the ground and have the pickets spaced more than 4 inches apart because some kid could stick their body through the opening and choke themselves to death, but it's perfectly cool to build a blank check house, especially multiple stories ones, with no alternative means of egress from the upper floors, and no sprinklers, for a family of 7. I digress, I could rant all day about how the NFPA, National FIRE Protection Association, and manufacturers pushing for AFCI technology, have anything to do with a device that, if it worked perfectly, might prevent half of all electrical fires, which account for around 10% of all fires in total.
It's hard to get people to even put up smoke detectors unless they are trying to sell a house, or even put batteries in existing ones.
Actual safety, like sprinklers, isn't sexy. Perceived safety, like afci Breakers, is a grotesque predation on people's fears.
Gfci technology... great stuff, actually works, should be in more places, which the 2017 NEC mandates per 210.8
AFCI technology, at the very very least, needs to be taken back to the drawing board and all requirements to use them immediately suspended... at worst, it would not surprise me to see a multi-billion-dollar class action lawsuit against the makers of these devices. Give it another 20 or 30 years, AFCIs will probably be seen the same way as FPE Breakers and aluminum branch circuit wiring of the 70s.
