Background
My project this weekend is to get my garage repowered so my tenant
will be able to plug his car in during the winter months. When I
bought my house it was recently renovated by house flippers who made the
basement into a suite and I suspect they used the circuit that was
going to the garage to power the new bathroom's lights/fan.
The Problem
The circuit to the garage has no power and I have a few options to connect it up but I'm not sure if the easiest option is bad.
Proposed solution
It looks like the there used to be a light fixture immediately outside of what is now the basement bathroom's door. The only other thing on the circuit is the washing machine. (Not the dryer it has it's own circuit) I am thinking I simply connect this wire to my garage wire and presto my garage has power. As a bonus, my garage circuit has a switch in the laundry room so if there is an issue with having both on, one could easily switch off the garage and do their laundry.
Question
Is this a bad idea? Could putting both on the same circuit lead to damaging something or safety issues?
Solution
It turned out the "hard" solution wasn't that hard at all. I added a 15amp circuit breaker to the panel and ran a new 14/2 cable to the switch. Easy peasy.
Best Answer
In general, all fixed appliances are supposed to be on their own circuit.
Thus, by code, you can't have something else on the same circuit as a washing machine. You can check your local building codes but I'll bet that's what they say.