Need help from an electrician or the like. I need more outlets in my garage, it only has one now. The problem is its also connected to the bathroom on the main floor. I keep throwing the breaker, I want to add a circuit just for the garage and a couple outlets. Can I do this with the service I have?
Short answer is yes. Long answer depends on a lot of things you didn't tell us, like where is the panel in relation to the garage, how willing are you to open up walls, etc.
I got a similar problem, and what I'm doing is I ran a 8/3 wire from my panel in thebasement to my garage. I can't remember what breaker I have to use, but I'm going put a panel in my garage, and then I just run all my 14/2 from the new panel in my garage to my new outlets.
With 8/3 you'll need to run a 40A breaker. Make sure that in your sub-panel in the garage you remove the bonding screw (if installed) between the ground and neutral buss and keep the wires clear. I'd run 12/2 also and 20A circuits. You'd hate to end up with something that needed 20A and not have it. Plus, I would actually have run 6/3 and a 60A breaker for a garage subpanel, because you do find tools that call for 220V 50A sometimes . . . Outlets in the garage need to be GFI protected. You can either use a GFI breaker or just put a GFI outlet as the first one on the circuit (cheaper).
Thanks, As for the panel it's in the garage. I was thinking or just running conduit outside the walls, just a couple of outlets. Can I run say 2 gfi outlets on one 20a breaker?
This is what i did, but have 5 or 6 outlets. I hate not having one where you need it. Not sure if it is code, but based on what i've seen it's done better than what's in the walls.
Yeah, conduit on the surface of the wall is fine. But you don't run 14/2 (implies non-metallic sheathed cable, like "romex") inside conduit. Rather you'll run individual wires. You can have as many outlets as you want on a breaker (within reason, there may be some limit, but it's bigger than you'll probably ever care about), you just can't draw more than 20A total from them all. Only the first outlet on the circuit needs to have the GFI module, it protects the rest.
