I replaced my breakers and everything sounds better!

OK, this is only partly a joke. My house was built in 2005 and the electrical panel was set up to code for then. The problem I had for a long time was mechanical buzzing/humming coming from it. This literally affected everything I heard in this house. Getting rid of it has lowered the level of stress I feel. Like my mind no longer has to spend time filtering it out.  In addition to this, doing a clean sweep of every 120V breaker seems to have cleaned up a couple of other AC gremlins I was having.

Turns out that in 2005, Arc Fault Circuit Interruptors (AFCI) breakers were just starting to be required but only for bedrooms. Well, up until around 2010 or so (based on the online forums) many of these had a mechanical hum that was audible even with the panel closed. Of course, if the panel was in a basement, who cares? But mine is not. From what I’ve read, the noise was no indicator of a bad breaker. Many good breakers hummed.

Fast forward to 2022, where a few things have changed. First, AFCI is passe. Now you need Combined AFCI (CAFCI) with better arc detection, and the National Fire Protection Agency was so impressed with the performance that as of 2020 virtually all residential 120V branch circuits require CAFCI.

But there is good news here too. Modern CAFCI breakers are dead silent. I replaced 18 and not one of them has any mechanical noise at all.

Anyway, my point is if you are living with noisy AFCI breakers go ahead and replace them with their modern counter part, or even upgrade your entire panel to 2020 specs and do them all.