I am now living in Cuenca, Ecuador. I have yet to see any electrical wiring that meets code. Zip, zilch, nada. Wires running everywhere, people scabbing onto other peoples houses to get electricity, etc. Since we do not have furnaces or A/C the electric company will install a 60 amp breaker in the same enclosure, below the meter itself. I saw the neighbors connection this morning. There are only three wires coming from the power company at this 60 amp breaker. It has been my intent to provide 4 wires, 2 hot, neutral and ground through the weatherhead and leave 3 feet of wire for their connection.
My shop, sub panel, is some 80 feet away. The wire will run in PVC tubing from a three hole "box" at each end. Within 3 feet of the meter/main I intend to drive a six foot copper bar into the ground and pull my ground out of the "box" to the ground bar and back into the PVC tubing. At the other end I would again pull the ground out of the box, atop which is mounted a mast that can be secured to an adjacent wall, and back up into the mast. From this mast I will have a drip loop mid-distance to the mast coming through my detached structure roof (weather head on all three masts). I would then ground the ground bus inside the sub panel, which already has an isolated neutral bus. Am I correct in my plan?
The scary part down here is while the fellow was modifying/repairing my brick wall for mounting the meter enclosure, I provided an elbow coming out of the fitting to the enclosure and then the mast is connected to the elbow and goes up the ten foot length of mast. Once concreted in place he, and a neighbor, are telling me that the electric company will not "allow" me to run cable INSIDE of the conduit!?! Sure enough, I look next door, around my house (15 domiciles in the urbanizacion) and not one of them has either a weather head, or cable running inside the conduit. In fact the cable, which is zip tied to the conduit, doesn't even have a bushing where it enters the meter enclosure!
Best Answer
You are best picking one Code and following it religiously. It looks like Ecuador is in the North American system of 120V on small circuits served as 240V/120V split-phase. So use American or Canadian code.
Any house in the United States gets only 3 wires from the power company and down the weatherhead: 2 hots and neutral. Typical weatherhead:
Note above that the bare weight-carrying cable is also carrying neutral. That is an idiom only the power company gets away with.
Each house derives its own ground with ground rods or water pipe bonds or both. And then, ground is bonded to neutral in the main panel only. From there to all other points, neutral and ground are carried separately. Go 8' on the copper bar, and use 2 of them at least 6' apart. On an outbuilding you would also need a grounding system bonded to the ground bus. That does not substitute for a wired ground, that is still needed. Dirt is not a good conductor.
That brings you into conformance with USA practice.
The main panel being defined as the panel where power comes in from the utility. If the power company provisions power to two of your buildings, you have two services. Don't mix them.
Wire from a main panel to a subpanel in an outbuilding must be 4-wire (hot-hot-neutral-ground). If you only need 120V devices, you can omit a "hot". Generally we bury lines between buildings, but if you go overhead, your bare/carrier wire can't be hot or neutral, those must be insulated.