ELECTRIC FENCE MADNESS

[Brimfield]

I have a small 110 powered electric fence for poultry. One side is the hot wire and the other is the ground. All the hot wire strand is on plastic insulators with nothing touching the chicken wire or anything else. The ground is good with 3 good earth grounds that never touch the hot side. I have one run of hot wire around the lower part of the coop and that works out fine, the fence test meter reads around 5.5. If I add one more layer of wire up higher I get a reading of 1.1 or .8. The second wire is run off the lower and never touches anything, and as I said before I use the plastic insulators to keep the hot wire away from anything.
And to add to this I discovered that if I touch the hot test lead from the meter to the electric fence unit I get 5.5 on the hot and .8 on the ground. Best part is the I don't have the test ground wire touching anything. For now I gave up and left it alone for the night.

 

[RNeumann]

If no grass or anything else is touching the hot side then I’d say the grounds aren’t “good”. How deep are they and what’s the soil like? Have you tried soaking the soil around the grounds?

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Something is touching something somewhere.

Just adding wire shouldn't change your voltage level. If it does, that wire is leaking current to ground. You could have bad insulators. I find the key to troubleshooting electric fence is being able to disconnect parts one at a time and measure.

The fence meter is only going to give accurate readings when the ground wire is connected to ground. I'm not surprised that you see spurious readings if you're in the vicinity of 5.5kV with the wire unattached. The meter doesn't care which end is ground.

 

[jaxs]

High voltage can leak across an air gap. Higher the voltage,wider the gap. Ever thing from posts,net wire and plants are at ground potential to varying degrees. As mentioned above, proper driven rod is a must for controling stray voltage.

 

[EddieWalker]

Almost every problem with electric fences has to do with ground. Did you use 8ft long copper rods? Did you place them ten feet apart or farther from each other? What did you use to connect the ground wire to the ground rods?

 

[Brimfield]

I actually have 3 ground rods on this 6' deep galvanized. I have the spread 10 feet or so apart. I used 14 gauge copper wire for 2 of the grounds and one has really thick aluminum wire, not sure the gauge but it must be 10 gauge minimum. One of the ground rods has a clamp sold by Zareba and the other 2 have hose clamps Our ground around here is wet, especially this year. I hope that the one wire down low will protect the chickens. This is a hoop house made with cattle fence to keep out coyote or stray dogs.

 

[Scook222]

Sometimes with galvanized rods you have to scrape a little off where the ground attaches to get a good ground with the battery style clips that come on the charger. Ifs easier to check for bad insulators at dark to see if they are arcing. I have had quite a few bad insulators that I could find till it was dark to see the arc. It also depends on the type of hot box that it is. I have had cheap ones that would only power one wire or two around the flower beds around the house. We have a Gallagher plug-in box that will run a half of a mile plus of 4 strand hot fence no problem. I think it is a 10 mile rated box. Even before I spray the fence, it is till very hot.