Our electricians in Chicago, IL provide many different services to help homes upgrade to modern electrical demands and the highest safety standards. One of the ways our electricians can improve household safety is with the installation of AFCI and GFCI outlets.
We’ve written before about these outlets, which you can easily recognize because they have buttons between the socket pairs marked TEST and RESET. In this post, we want to address what makes the two different and where we recommend having them installed in a house.
Outlets have changed significantly over the decades. Once, homes only had two-pronged outlets. Later, three-pronged grounded outlets became the standard. Now GFCI and AFCI outlets help homes to maintain greater safety with even more powerful electrical loads.
The changes in electrical usage in homes over the last twenty years, even the last ten years, are nothing short of incredible. The average household now consumes more electricity than ever before because of the increase in charging electrical devices and powerful computers and home entertainment systems. Electrical circuitry and panels have to stay current with the rise in consumption, but the outlets have to change as well.