stanley baer wrote:

I have found several hundred feet of 8 AWG wire that I would like to
use to bring electricity to my shop that is 200' from my house. At the
moment I use a 3ph propane powered generator but it is expensive to run.

I plan to run the wire through a buried plastic conduit and have enough
wire to be able to have two of each of the power carrying conducters and
two ground conducters.

What will the current capacity be of this setup? (I realize it is
probably not up to code)

stan

Stan, with all due respect you are going about this the wrong way. You should
first determine what load you need in your shop (a lot of guys get along fine
with 60 amps) and make sure you can pull the required amperage off of your
current panel (this would make the panel in your shop a "subpanel"). Once you
have decided on your amperage and you know how far it has to run then go look up
the voltage drop tables and find out what wire size you need. If that happens to
be 8AWG then fine, use it. Otherwise just buy the wire you need. The expense
will be trivial compared to the effort it will be to get power to your shop, and
to the benefit (and value) you will get. And, it will be to code! Have you
considered what would happen if there were a fire in your shop and your
insurance company found a bunch of illegal wiring? Think one of today's
insurance companies might try to weasel out of paying? I sure do! Do it right,
do it once. Even if you can't use the 8AWG for pulling your subpanel, you may
well be able to use it inside your shop when you wire all your outlets, etc.

Good on you for asking first!

GWE