Polytape is the most visible, so a great choice for horses.. .
Grounding is the least of my concerns: I have wet acidic loamy soil which is ideal to carry electrical charges. I did soil resistivity measurements at several spots and nowhere was it more than 60 Ω/m. I begin to understand why the fruit trees on my land are doing so poor…
My house has a grounding-rod? - Just kidding! The grounding rod for my house is also called »main water pipe«.
The house is 56 years old and definitely not up to any code anymore.
If you’ve got rock close by underneath you can use a grounding plate, like some houses have. Spacing of your wires is then going to be the most important detail and ensuring you’ve got enough oomph in your energizer.
I was thinking to do both, grounding the fence for taller animals which would use their noses to sniff out the wires, a charged low wire for smaller critters like skunks and possums together with a grounded wire, something like this:If you’re running electric and you have rocky and or dry conditions, I would say you’d be much better off using a positive/negative system. You can (and should) still sink at least one ground rod, but with a pos/neg system, the animal touches both a “hot” (pos) and “cold” (neg) wire and completes the circuit without it having to travel from the hot wire, through the animal, into the ground, over to the ground connection, to give a shock. Dogs can squeeze through pretty tight wires and have a fur coat that protects them from weak shocks, so the harder it zaps the better. My husky x can waltz right through the hot wire I have set up for the cows because she barely brushes it with her fur.
I also like to bait my hot wire with a bit of bacon grease etc for the foxes and coyotes to take a bite out of, too.
I’ve used a chicken wire/fence wire apron as my negative wire too, so when the animal is standing on it, and touches the hot wire, they get an excellent zap.
positive/negative fences are often used for bee hives to keep bears away. Lots of info out there on setting them up.
Yup! The energizer, i have already learned that i need a low impedance energizer for dogs and 'coons due to their thick fur and i looked at TSC and RK and their web-sites only say »covers up to a gazillion miles of fence« nothing about impedance.If you’ve got rock close by underneath you can use a grounding plate, like some houses have. Spacing of your wires is then going to be the most important detail and ensuring you’ve got enough oomph in your energizer.
