Electric Fence Earth Stake Spacing

Don t place your earth stake next to trees.

Electric fence earth stake spacing.

How does earthing work. And i continue to see folks make many of the same common mistakes. I still make mistakes myself because i m constantly challenging myself to make fencing easier faster stronger and safer. A common strategy when people wire an electric fence and arrive at a gate opening is to tap off one live wire run it under the gateway and then spread it into two wires on the other side.

Materials needed and labor required to build power fence are both significantly less than for barbed wire up to 1 000 per mile less. When i put in our electric fence unit 15 years ago i rammed in 2 earth stakes into a bit of swampy spring connected these with no 8 galvanised wire and connected that to a. Does power fence cost more to build than barbed wire. Make sure your earth stake is pushed into the ground as far as you can get it.

With 30 years of experience building hundreds of km of electric fence i ve seen just about every fencing mistake possible. But when conditions become dry mike says. Small and nimble species like rabbits for instance need more lines than larger less agile animals like cattle or horses. And do not forget to miss the walls and trees.

Which is picked up by a series of earth stakes connected to the earth terminal unit creating a circuit. First you need to create a dead short on your electric fence line at least 100 metres away from the earth stakes by laying an iron bar across the wires to ground. Larger energizers with large fence lines require more earthing rods. The number of lines in your electric fence and their spacing depends on the size and agility of the animals you want to contain or deter.

The earth system consists of a number of earth rods the provide an effective low resistance path for the current to return to the energizer s earth terminal. The fence charger or energizer is designed to alter the electric charge into a power that is safe for animals and people. With a voltmeter measure the voltage between the earth stakes and the ground. Fortunately this is easy to rectify.

Additional earth stakes may be added by driving them into the ground 1 2 meters away from the existing stake and joining them together. For an electric fence shock the current produced by an energizer must complete a full circuit. If your fence is very long then the earth will have to be better than if it is short because the circuit is much bigger from the electric wire back to the earth stake s. The ground constitutes 50 of the electrical circuit but 90 of all problems originate at poor earthing either at the earth stake itself or on the fence.

The moral of this story is that the simplest thing can cause a failure of an electric fence.