The thing that is left out of this whole story that you don't realize unless you are around it all of the time, is that subs are responsive to those whom they have an established relationship with (those that have and will continue to feed them work). Coordinating multiple subs is more often than not, all about timing - this needs to be done before that can proceed, ...etc,... If you do not get that rough grade, you don't get your irrigation piped installed, if you don't have the irrigation running properly, you don't get your sod, .. Believe it or not, if you schedule them to be in on Thursday morning and they get a call from someone that they continually sub for, they ain't coming. You can't overlook that some subs don't like other subs and can be less accommodating for them. When you hire "one throat", they usually have a core of subs who know the details of how the others do things and are programmed to set the others up without a lot of discussion. Familiarity makes things flow easily. When subs have not worked with each other, expectations and assumptions that somethings will be done a certain way may not be accurate - not done poorly, just different than expected causing the others to have to adjust.

I'd definitely want lights spread out over a 12 ft island. I think multiple pendants have been fashionable for many years, as I know I put them over my island in 2000. I've actually noticed recently a trend towards fewer larger pendants/fixtures. At the end of the day, it's really whatever you like. But, you do need more than one light fixture in that large a space. Lighting standards recommend MUCH more lighting in a kitchen than a living area, since a kitchen is a working space. I'd really look for at least two large pendants, and more likely three. If you only do two, I think they really need to be BIG -- 12" or more in diameter, for sure. If you go with 3, you could get away with smaller ones. I did three 8" diameter simple pendants over my 7 ft island . . . My ceilings are 10 ft, and the larger pendants look balanced with the space, whereas I think the smaller more common pendants would look a little silly with those huge ceilings. Assuming you have tall ceilings since they are sloped . . . and knowing you have a gigantic island, I'd lean toward either two large (14-18" diameter multi-bulb) fixtures or three medium sized (8-12 inch, with one or two high watt bulbs). That fixture linked above is only a bit over 4 ft wide, still leaving about 4 feet on each end, which seems a bit much to me to leave without an overhead light (since presumably each of the bulbs will just be 60 watt or equivalent). I'd want two fixtures, about 6 feet apart . . . or better yet, I'd really want three fixtures, each about 4 feet apart (i.e., end of island - 2 ft - light - 4 feet - light - 4 feet - light -2 feet -opposite end). That's what I'd do anyway.

Yes, it would be a chandelier. :) So "to scale" would just disregard the length calculation then? Use: A standard 8-foot ceiling requires a chandelier that is 20-24 inches in height. Choose a chandelier whose width is at least half the smallest diameter of your table, and no larger than the smallest diameter of your table less 12". In our case the width should be between 20." and 29".

Once again, I am no expert, but just moving the breaker with its corresponding wires attached to another position in the panel, in my opinion, won't accomplish much because all the slots in the panel are tied to the same bus bars. What I suggested was to leave all the breakers in place, but let's say the troublesome breaker feeds "2nd storey lights and receptacles" and another AFCI breaker in the panel feeds "hall and living room lights". You would leave the breakers in place, and disconnect the hot wires going to "2nd storey lights" and "hall and living room" from their respective breakers. Then take the wire feeding "2nd storey lights" and connect it to the breaker that before was feeding "hall and living room", and the wire that once fed "hall and living room" would go to the troublesome breaker. If the problem is still with the "second storey lights", which are now hooked up to where "hall and living room" was before, it's safe to assume the problem lies within the wiring of "2nd storey lights and receptacles". If the problem is now with the "hall and living room", then it's safe to assume that the circuit wiring is not at fault and you are getting nuisance tripping, probably from the solar system. The other test I was suggesting about was to leave the breaker attached, and turned on, and leave its neutral pigtail connected to the neutral bus, but remove the hot (usually black or red) from the breaker. This way, if the breaker trip with nothing connected to it, it has to be nuisance tripping. Because you mentioned several lights and outlets in 5 rooms, my suggestion for you not to lose power to a good portion of your house, was to add a regular breaker, less expensive than an AFCI breaker, and buy an AFCI receptacle (they look just like the GFCI receptacle in your kitchen or bathroom, with test/reset buttons, but they trip on arc faults instead of ground fauts) to feed the circuit. This way the whole circuit (except for the short run between the panel and the AFCI receptacle) is protected agains arc fauts, but I would imagine that the receptacle would be less subject to stray voltages or surges that might occur in the panel. As far as the low ohms thing, I would not thing too much about it, we are missing information to really use that to troubleshoot. Here's a brief explanation of ohms. Ohms is the unit of measure of electrical resistance, just like the pound is the unit of measure of weight and the ampere is the unit of measure of electrical current. Good electrical conductors, like copper wiring in a house, have a resistance very close to 0 ohms. Poor conductors, like plastic or rubber, have a very high resistance in the order of several megohms (millions of ohms). Depending how and where they were measuring, "low ohms" could mean different things. If they were measuring ALONG wires, they were checking for a loose connection that could cause arcing and tripping of the breaker. In that case, you want the resistance to be as close to 0 as possible. Measuring ACROSS two wires, which is what it sounds like they were doing if they "found low ohms when testing the red wire to ground up in our attic", on a branch circuit, will only measure the resistance of what is connected to the circuit, like the resistance of every light bulb, ceiling fan motor, perhaps a radio or laptop plugged into a bedroom receptacle. Devices are connected in parallel, therefore the resistance measured across the hot and neutral wires of the circuit will vary according to what is connected or plugged in. For instance, a regular incandescent 100-watt bulb will have a resistance of roughly 150 ohms, but a vacuum cleaner could have a resistance as low as 10 ohms. It is normal, and the only way possible, to measure resistance with the circuit powered off.