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I rent a house in the US and recently have decided I’d like to add a refrigerator and exercise treadmill to my garage. The washer and dryer are already plugged into a receptacle in the garage so I was hoping that the new additions could plug into a second receptacle.

I don’t want to trip any breakers with all these new appliances, especially if they were all to run at the same time so I tried to figure out if the washer/dryer are on their own dedicated circuit, as well as which circuit powers the receptacle I’d like to use for the new additions.

I’m green when it comes to this sort of stuff. In my panel box there’s a circuit labeled “washer/dryer” but flipping it off does not power off anything in the house. I’ve tried the other breakers and combinations of them but nothing seems to power off the washer/dryer or the other garage receptacle. The ONLY thing that works is flipping off the 100amp double pole breaker, which shuts off everything in the house as well.

What’s going on here?

Can I safely assume that adding a treadmill and fridge to the garage won’t create excessive electrical load, since they are seemingly on a 100 amp breaker?

(I feel like I’m missing something here)

panel breaker

Alaska Man
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Hunter
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1 Answers1

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As a renter, your "work" can only consist of trying to track down what the actual relationship of circuits to locations is (see if there's another spot that "looks like" it could have had a washer/dryer, for instance) and trying the devices you want to run on the outlets you want to run them on to see if a breaker trips, or not - given that modern refrigerators are usually small loads (mine does 50-60W unless it's defrosting at 200W) your main likely issue with overloading would be don't wash and dry and treadmill at the same time.

We have some previous questions and answers about tracking down circuits. Labelling is often outdated or wrong - just be systematic and make a note of what breaker affects each device location.

Any electrical work on a rental has to be done by a licensed electrician (as others already commented.)

Ecnerwal
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