Electric fence?

[DLS]

Hello I am new here , I am getting the brown egg asst. From McM the week of the 24th. I have got my chicken yard fence up & have gotten a fencer from ebay. looks great! How high should I put the strands of electric fencing to keep out Foxes, dogs, coons, possums, cats, ect?-- we have them all I might put up 3 or 4 loops of electric fence wire around the yard . I put a HUGE net over the top to keep redtail hawks & owls out.
But the spacing of the wire is on my mind today.
DLS.

 

[greyfields]

It really depends how fast and quickly your grass grows. Many predators (especially dogs) will dug under the bottom wire to get in. So, you want to put that no higher than 6" off the ground. My grass grows too quickly, so I can go no lower than 8" and then the bottom wire still gets shorted out a lot.

Most people run the wires 6" apart up to 2', then move up to 12" spacing. Also, get a catalog from these guys, they have all the diagrams and recommendations you'll ever need:

http://www.premier1supplies.com/

 

[DLS]

whats this?? shorted out?? tell me about that.

 

[panner123]

Shorted out is when any grass, weeds
or anything hits the hot wire. This causes the system to lose is effectiveness, volts, going though the wire. Check out the American fence wet site, it is afence.com, they will walk you though the whole installation and the up keep of one.

 

[Wolf-Kim]

When the fence is "shorted out" by the weeds it is grounded. Once the weeds ground the wire, it in a sense redirects the electric flow into the ground, thus making it ineffective. That's why you have to have insulators for the wire, because if the wire touches the pole, the pole grounds it. It's how an animal gets shocked, an animal is grounded(touching the ground), so when they touch the wire

, the electric flow is "redirected" through the animal.

I've seen hotwire around a coop as low as 4 inches. To make the fence really effective you can run one "hot/electric" strand insulated from the posts, and then 3 inches up from that a strand that is "grounded"(Stapled directly to the posts) and then another 4 inches from that another "hot strand." By alternating "grounded" wires and "hot" wires, you insure that the animal touching the wires will be grounded(by the grounded wires). This alternating pattern is what alot of farmers use to contain cattle(notoriously stubborn for getting out through an electric fence).

-Kim