Cows were a hazard to traffic having got out of their field yesterday due to the electric fence, though still functioning being ineffective due to the dry soil. Really? Is this the only earth return? I'd have thought two wires would have been needed, but maybe not? Brian
HI Brian We use a little battery-powered fencer to keep the local foxes out of our chickens. The 'hot' end consists of two big crocodile clips - one goes to the electrified wire or tape, the other goes to an earth stake (a short piece of copper pipe in our case). Any stray animals looking for a chicken dinner complete the circuit between the 'earth' and the high voltage wire..
All the fencers I've seen work this way - it's not unusual to have a mile or so of electrified fence, and the earth-stake is a convenient way of providing that second wire.
From a quick Google search, it seems that dry weather can cause problems - and a possible solution for this is to add a second 'earth' wire to the fence (recommended in one article for cattle, horses and bears (!))
- other fixes include watering the ground around the eatrth stake, alternative types of electric fencers, and praying for rain.
It's not usually a problem over here > Cows were a hazard to traffic having got out of their field yesterday due to
No, the 'energizer' has an earth rod and then just a single wire runs round all the fences. If there were two wires you'd be dependent on the horse/cow/pig/whatever touching both wires. Two wires close together would be very difficult to maintain as well.
Funnily enough our local farmer was telling me about an electric fence that was useless because of poor ground conductivity. He was planning to knock an earth spike in real deep.
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