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Sounds like you have surrounded your coop and run with a hot wire, leaving only an opening at the opening that is the gate or doorway into the run? As long as the gate is in contact with the ground somehow via conductive materials, then it should deliver a shock. Best way to test it would be to do as you suggest and use your tester and place the ground side probe on the gate and then hot side to hot wire. In this case, you are not testing the wire......you already know that is hot......you are testing the gate to see if it is properly grounded. So final question would be, how secure is your gate? Can nothing get through it? (except you)
I mentioned testers, but did not dwell on them. Other than grabbing the wire yourself, or tricking some 15 year old kid into doing it, about the only way to know for sure if the wire is hot is to use a voltage tester. I have the digital kind as most of the ones I've seen with LED lights on a scale top out at 7,000 volts. My stuff is running much hotter than that......nearly double.
But I have also read a few accounts where people had fences up and thought they were protected, only to discover the fence was delivering only a mild shock or none at all. I had the same situation a while back with a poly tape used on a horse fence. About 3/4 of the fence run was hot, and the rest was not. Nothing. Using the tester, I isolated it down to the inch where the wire in the tape had broken.......tape looked fine and normal, but there was a spot where the wire was broken, so no more shock. I cut it, spliced it and tested again and all was back to normal. Again, other than to watch the animals walk out with no harm done or touch it myself to find out.....wow, I would hate that job........not many ways to troubleshoot that except to use the tester.
Speaking of troubleshooting, I find if I end a run at the same place I start, I can then test it at the beginning, and without moving, test it at the end. If the reading is the same, I know I have a good hot wire all the way around. That could be miles all the way around but if the run finishes as hot as is starts, the only way it can do that is if it is that hot all the way around. If it drops off at the end, I've got a problem of some type......perhaps a wire is off an insulator and is grounding, limb on the line, or something similar and need to go looking for it.
I mentioned testers, but did not dwell on them. Other than grabbing the wire yourself, or tricking some 15 year old kid into doing it, about the only way to know for sure if the wire is hot is to use a voltage tester. I have the digital kind as most of the ones I've seen with LED lights on a scale top out at 7,000 volts. My stuff is running much hotter than that......nearly double.
But I have also read a few accounts where people had fences up and thought they were protected, only to discover the fence was delivering only a mild shock or none at all. I had the same situation a while back with a poly tape used on a horse fence. About 3/4 of the fence run was hot, and the rest was not. Nothing. Using the tester, I isolated it down to the inch where the wire in the tape had broken.......tape looked fine and normal, but there was a spot where the wire was broken, so no more shock. I cut it, spliced it and tested again and all was back to normal. Again, other than to watch the animals walk out with no harm done or touch it myself to find out.....wow, I would hate that job........not many ways to troubleshoot that except to use the tester.
Speaking of troubleshooting, I find if I end a run at the same place I start, I can then test it at the beginning, and without moving, test it at the end. If the reading is the same, I know I have a good hot wire all the way around. That could be miles all the way around but if the run finishes as hot as is starts, the only way it can do that is if it is that hot all the way around. If it drops off at the end, I've got a problem of some type......perhaps a wire is off an insulator and is grounding, limb on the line, or something similar and need to go looking for it.
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