[hohadcr]

My garage is an independent building 50ft away from my house with no electricity at all right now. I want to add electricity to it.

My house is on 100amp panel and I eventually will change it to 200amp and allocate the extra 100amp to the garage. I will ask a master electrician to do the upgrade but for now, I just want to prepare for it.

I am going to dig a trench, bury conduit and proper wires from my house to the garage and get a subpanel ready in the garage.

it may take me years before I am ready to get a master electrician to upgrade the ampage. Before doing that, I would like to just have one or two lights in my garage.

This is the question: When I run the conduit and wire to the garage right now,

1. do I just run the 100amp wire and feed a 15amp breaker for the garage for lighting at the moment?

2. or do I run the 100amp wire for future and add a 14/2 wire in the conduit to run lighting for now?

Thanks a lot

 

[Techy]

You can install a 100 amp sub panel in your garage now, you're just limited to a total 100amp draw total between the house and garage until you upgrade to 200 amp.

 

[hohadcr]

Maybe my question is just based on my wild imagination.

I was thinking, maybe i would waste a lot of energy runing max 15amps on a 100amp wire over to the garage...

 

[teamo]

The sub panel project can be completed without having any affect on the service change at the main panel. The lighting circuit will be run off of the sub panel with 14/2 cable and it's own 15 amp breaker in the sub panel. From your post I think you are assuming that the 200 amp upgrade will be split between 100amps for the main service and 100 amps for the sub panel. That isn't how it works. The sum of the breakers does not get added together to give you the service amperage. A proper load calculation takes into account that not every circuit is going to be run at the same time and not to 100 percent of their capacity.

 

[hohadcr]

I think i got it.

Just run a underground cable with conduit of 100amp for the garage for now.

Although I am only using 15amp for lighting before upgrading to 200amp, I can run the lighting over the 100amp cable.