electrifying fence - is my husband insane?

[valley ranch]

Greetings, We electrified our fence and barn. We built a horse wire fence, we added to that 9 strand 9.5 joule electrified wires. It workes well for bear, coyote, raccoon, dog and more. It is well worth doing.

Richard

 

[ARose4Heaven]

We ran a couple of wire strands from our cattle fence. Goes all the way round the coop and run. One wire 6 inches up, another 2 feet up. Terrifies our dogs, and the run fence is very much NOT predator proof. The electric is set 6 inches outside the regular fence. The only creature that gets through is cats and our pomeranian. Neither of these is a danger to the chiickens. But I only use this for my meaties. By the time a vermin figures out how to get under or through the electric wire, the birds are in the freezer.

I would not recommend relying on electric for your layer flock. They are there for long term, and vermin eventually figure out how to avoid the electric.

 

[patandchickens]

Quote:
Sorry, but you will find if you go out there with an accurate fence tester that it DOES ground out when it sags. "Ground out" does not necessarily mean "instantly go totally dead", it just means "fence voltage decreases". If your initial clean-fence voltage is high enough, some grounding out is tolerable, you may still be able to stay above whatever's the minimum required zap. But with a less adequate charger, or more fouling of the fence by weeds etc, the fence can feel "live" (i.e. you touch it and go Ow!) and yet no longer have ENOUGH charge to effectively repel predators.

It should be remembered that to RELIABLY keep out dogs, coyotes and similar predators, you really need to be running at least 4,000v (which is getting towards the 'knock your socks off' range if you touch it yourself, not merely 'dang that made me jump!').

Do not trust those five-neon-lights fence testers, they will tell you if the fence is on and can more or less distinguish between super strong and super weak charge but they are NOT accurate enough to rely on for actual voltage, you need a digital meter for that.

Or of course you can not worry about it and let the fence be potentially only weakly-charged, and it will still do some good; after all, it IS a physical fence, and one that is unpleasant for animals to touch; but in that scenario you should not expect it to protect your <whatever> the way an actual electric fence would, as you do not have enough zap to get the full reliability of benefits.

Pat

 

[Chicken Casanova]

Now the electric wire at the bottom does it keep preditors from diging in and how far do you have it from your coop and off the ground

 

[gsim]

On mine, I have it set 8" above ground. There are 4 and top one is at 48" ht. I use springs to keep them tight. See My BYC page.

Gerry