Have to fix electric dog fence; how to find wire break?

[Sprinklerman]

Cal a local irrigation company , they generally have a progressive 721 wire tracker . I have them and find wire breaks like that for people alot .

 

[Mendonsy]

I have an Amprobe wire tracer. That will allow you to follow a wire that is buried down to about 4'. Those are too expensive to purchase for a one-shot use, but maybe a local electric contractor might have one and would trace your wire to locate the break.

 

[Daver1963]

If its a two wire system you can just hook a lead to each wire and not worry about ground.
I don't know if its a technical term, but a telephone man should know what a hound dog or cable hound is. Its like a tone generator, but works on a "null" principle. That means you hear tone when you aren't on the cable and it goes silent when it is.

 

[CurlyDave]

The modern way to find a break in a wire is with a gadget called a "Time Domain Reflectometer". These can be rented, although who has one in your area is something you need to find.

A cursory internet search shows one that claims to find wire problems in circuits between 150 and 48,000 feet.

 

[Daver1963]

The modern way to find a break in a wire is with a gadget called a "Time Domain Reflectometer". These can be rented, although who has one in your area is something you need to find.

A cursory internet search shows one that claims to find wire problems in circuits between 150 and 48,000 feet.

I've used many different time domain reflectometers (TDR) that measure coax, telephone wire, and fiber optics, but most of them are kind of pricey. Plus in the case of wire if you don't know the impedance of the wire a TDR won't give you an accurate reading.

 

[Mace Canute]

We used a TDR at work to locate faults in the underground primary cables (14.4 Kv to ground) most of which were between transformers in residential areas so roughly 100 meters each run. They were nice in that it would narrow down the fault to within plus or minus 25 feet or so (give or take) but the TDR certainly could not be depended on to locate a fault on just distance alone. For that we had to use a "surge generator cable fault locator" commonly known as a thumper because of the sound it made when the generated voltage would arc over from the conductor to ground. Once we had narrowed down where the fault should be we would disconnect the TDR, hook up the thumper and walk the line and listen for the telltale thump, thump, thump.

 

[Threepoint]

CM, don't know how large an area your electronic dog fence covers, but this is what I've used to locate breaks in ours for 15 years. It's what the professional installer kept on his truck for service calls, so I figured it was a good unit. Spendy, for sure, but the underground-fence portion of our property covers around five acres, so it's paid for itself several times over the years. GREENLEE Buried Cable Locator 501 - G1091456 at Zoro