A treatise on Electric Fencing

[Howard E]

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.

 

[Lookin4GoodLife]

Mine's hot. I was bent over hammering some staples into the wire tonight pushing out on the fence wire. Pushed it into the hot wire outside and felt like someone kicked me in the ribs.

Mine's the low-end one sold for chickens and such that's only 'bout 8,000 volts. I'd hate to get shocked by yours. LOL

I guess the only thing grounding my gate is the two strap hinges holding it to the wooden post that goes into the ground. That and I've got just one door closer with the spring clip on it so the raccoons can't open it. I do probably need one down lower because after reading threads here last night, I pulled on the bottom of my gate and it probably comes open enough for a determined raccoon to get in. It'd be a struggle, but one more for night time won't hurt. You can see from my picture that the wire comes around from the left in the yellow plastic insulators, goes up over the gate, back down the other side of the gate and then to the back of the coop. I like your idea of ending where you start so you can test it. I'll definitely set up that way when I build my homestead. Great idea. I was a computer tech back in the day and I always troubleshot from one end to the other like that and it never let me down.

 

[Shezadandy]

Mine's hot. I was bent over hammering some staples into the wire tonight pushing out on the fence wire. Pushed it into the hot wire outside and felt like someone kicked me in the ribs.

Mine's the low-end one sold for chickens and such that's only 'bout 8,000 volts. I'd hate to get shocked by yours. LOL

You know you've got it right when you hear a terrible scream, wonder who's making all that noise-- and then, you realize it's you and the scream was involuntary.

 

[aart]

I guess the only thing grounding my gate is the two strap hinges holding it to the wooden post that goes into the ground.

Maybe I'm blind.... but I only see the one hinge, upper left door......regardless that hinge is not touching door mesh and wood is an insulator.
Wonders if you could tie a wire to mesh on hinge side of door to a grounding rod?

 

[Rock Home Isle]

This entire thread is amazing

 

[oakhollow]

Nice work. There is one thing I would like to clarify. An ac charger does NOT trip a gfi with every shock. I have had 3 ac chargers plugged into 4 different gfi outlets without issue. This is because the circuitry, including a capacitor where the charge originates, is sort of separated from the power supply. I use wooden box with the front and bottom open to protect my outdoor chargers from the weather. My preferred method of plugging in the charger is to bury an extension cord in pvc pipe, although my "temporary" set up has been sitting above ground for about 4 years now. I just have to make sure not to run it over with the mower, and if the joint between the 2 extension cords sits too long in a puddle during severe rain (maybe 1-2 times per year) it trips the gfi.

 

[Howard E]

On the GFI (ground fault interrupt outlet), I found a number of references to it as a recurring issue by users with GFI outlets and AC chargers and actually called Parmak and asked them about it and they confirmed it could. I guess that is "could" and not "would"? If you setup is not tripping it, that would be ideal.

One other issue on AC fencers is the need for lightening protection. Was reminded of this last week when my aunt and uncle's home caught on fire after a lightening strike. And it didn't even hit their home. It hit the power line leading up to it somewhere and the surge jumped ship and caught a bedroom on fire where the service panel was. Interesting that there are at least 6 or 7 homes within a mile of that home and of those, at least 4 had lightening damage to electric devices from the same storm event. The surge in the line hit them all. Apparently AC chargers are sensitive to this, so if you have one, you need to put a lighting arrestor between it and the plugin......that is as per the folks that make these chargers. Some will go so far as to say the warranty on the fencer is voided if you don't.

 

[Howard E]

On fences.........time to elaborate and mention some more options..........

Found this youtube on protecting corn from coons:

Corn and chickens? Same principle applies......keeping coons and varmints out.

Note how this guy has included a third wire in his setup. The middle wire is not hot, but is grounded. As per the guy that produced this video, his claim is coons and varmints will not crawl under the low wire, but over it and through two wires. By putting in a middle wire and grounding it, the coon is almost certain to get zapped. Others will use a full three wire setup, with all three being hot. That may be overkill, or not depending on the severity of your problem.

This is actually a variation on an electric poultry netting option you can buy, in which the horizontal bands in the fence are not all hot, but alternate between hot and grounded. Again, this way you don't have to rely upon the ground (again, literally the ground you stand upon) to be the conductor for the negative side. The fence itself it also connected to the ground so is as good a connection as can be had.

Graphic looks like this:




This guy also spent a great deal of time talking about the need for this elaborate ground rod setup. I'm not sure he understands the nature of things, as that is vast overkill. If you were to simply drop a short piece of wire from both the red (hot) connection and black (ground) connection, and put your tester on these two wires, you would be measuring the full shocking potential of your fencer. The main reason for a good ground is to make certain that the connection a person makes to the ground (again, literally the ground you walk on) is as good as it is from the simple drop wire. If one steel post in the ground gives you the same reading on your tester, you can't do better than that if you add 100 more ground rods. Maxed out is maxed out. You can have 50 ground rods and if the coon or varmint is not well grounded, it won't matter. So putting in the grounded middle wire takes the guesswork out of it. That it ties the middle grounded wire directly to the fencer and will be every bit as good a connection as the hot wire side, so should deliver the maximum shock possible from your fencer, even if you add 50 more ground rods and pound them in halfway to China. So test the fencer with short wires, then test it through your ground and if that is the same, you can't do better than that and it is enough.

One of the problems with these low wire fences is to be effective, they have to be that close to the ground to keep the varmint from sneaking under it, so there is a constant maintenance issue to keep the weeds and grass from shorting them out. Low impedance fencers, are designed to punch through this so as to continue shocking, even though the fence is grounded by weeds. I can only imagine, however, that will shorten battery life as the juice gets drained off through the weeds, not to mention a less violent shock delivered to the varmint.

One addition benefit of the low single or double or triple wire fences is with the birds themselves. If they do somehow manage to find themselves on the outside, a single bird or two trying to rejoin their buddies will eventually work up the nerve to punch through these to get back home, and even more so if a varmint is in hot pursuit and they are fleeing for their lives. Not so much if they are outside a woven wire or some other high wire fence. They are trapped and easy prey.




Sketch above depicts another fence option used by an experienced user and coon fighter I met a few years back. For his fence, he simply pounded in some 2" x 2" x 2 foot wooden stakes, the kind used for setting light concrete forms, laying out foundations, etc. (you can buy them pre-made at the box stores and lumber yards). To this he added about a foot or so of chicken wire, leaving a couple inches of wood stake sticking out on top of that. In the ends or tops of the stakes, he nailed in electric fence insulators, the kind you nail into fence posts. So he then had a single hot wire, but it was running about knee high and well up off the ground away from weeds, grass, etc., yet low enough a person could still step over it (carefully!) without getting shocked. I don't think he even had a gate....to come and go he was simply stepping over it. So a coon encounters the fully grounded chicken wire fence, tries to climb it and when he reaches the top, grabs the hot wire with his grubby little paws and gets blasted into next week. This fence has the added benefit of also being about belly high on a deer. Not high enough a deer will jump over it, but just right so they will simply step over it, brush the wire with their belly and also get blasted into next week. This fence required a whole lot less maintenance than a low wire and would be more permanent in nature. He was spraying the ground on both sides of it with Roundup to keep ANY weeds and grass from growing up through it.

A variation on this knee high fence, if you don't trust chicken wire, is to use the same type setup, except in this one, you use a heavier welded wire in the 2" x 4" range, using the same L shaped apron trick used to keep predators from digging under our runs and coops. Half on the ground and half on the fence posts (ideally steel posts which when connected to the fence make a direct ground), with a single or double hot wire on top they have to reach onto to climb over. Not so high as to induce a fox or coyote to jump over, you want them to try to climb over by putting their paws on top and BAMMO! Again, less maintenance than a low ground wire. Similar to a plastic rope poultry net fence, but less expensive and more permanent in nature. On this one, they can't go under it......can't go over it.....and can't go through it. The ultimate perimeter?

 

[NickChillPhoto]

Awesome information! Thank you.

 

[Rock Home Isle]

I am impressed, you are a font of knowledge