Electric Fencing Ep. 3: Ground Systems

hello I'm Ron Shaw and I work for frontier extension district and welcome back this is the third in the series of our electric fence videos today we're going to talk about the ground system and you know last time we talked about how the charger was was the heart of the system the ground system is the whole rest of the body because if something else is if something's going to go wrong it's probably gonna go wrong in the ground system I've had phone calls and guys saying well my electric fence system doesn't seem like it's hot what's what's going on and so one of the things I'll do is I'll ask him how many ground rods do you have in and I would guess 90% of the time or 95% of the time they'll tell me one ground ball well in eastern Kansas we get dry and there are times of the year when one ground rod is not going to be adequate you know for the ground system to work or the whole charging system to work when that cow touches that electric fence it goes that energy goes through her body through her feet back through the ground back to the ground system and that's when it completes its cycle and that cow gets a shock okay but if we're really really dry not enough of that electricity oftentimes gets back to the ground system and so we don't have a good performing electric fence system so it's it's it's kind of a rule of thumb that you start with a minimum of three six foot ground rods into the ground okay so we want three six foot rods all the way into the ground now that's just kind of the place where we start we typically want three foot of a ground rod per Joule of output from our charger so if you remember last time we talked about our charters and the joules one Joule with with power one mile of fence well now what we're looking at is we're taking those same jewels and we're saying we need three foot of grand rod to give that crown system enough enough ground rods to perform adequately so if you look at this charger this charger right here says it's a 24 jul 2015 12 how many of you would have ever guessed that any ground system would need 12 ground rods my guess is nobody out there thinks about having that many that many ground rods now we want to we want to also talk about ground rods when you go have to purchase ground rods we have 5/8 inch diameter ground rods and we have 1/2 inch ground rods I would always suggest that we use 5/8 inch it's just that big much bigger in diameter it's just that much more soil in contact with that ground rod and it will actually there's not enough difference in cost to warrant going to 1/2 inch brown okay now we've talked about we in this case we needed 12 we need to space those about 10 foot apart okay and preferably in a moist and a moist area so if it's in a drip line of a building or let's say maybe we don't have that as an option so we go out we put it right underneath the fins that may be the next best option we can do this put it right underneath the fence that way we can we can get our whole 120 feet that we need for that ground system now you can you can use copper or you can use galvanized okay but don't mix the metals anytime you would mix metal you're gonna get corrosion and when you get corrosion then you'll also get poor conductivity of that electricity so we definitely want to if we're going to use copper we want to use copper wire copper rods as well as copper clamps if we're going to use galvanized use galvanized wire galvanized clamps and galvanized right now here I am I'm kind of a penny pincher so I like to use the galvanized galvanized much cheaper you know copper wires expensive copper ground rod is probably three times what galvanized ground rod is so from that standpoint I like to use use the galvanized the other thing we want to think about is when we're placing our ground system in the ground we've got to keep up at least 65 feet away from any other ground field so if you have a utility ground or well casing or you have another building here that has a ground system we need to keep this about 65 feet from those from those other areas and then lastly when we put these in the ground we want to leave about this much out of the ground okay we want we want the clamp and the wire and four or five inches out of the ground so we can find that ground system if something happens one more thing when you run your wire and you go from your charger you're going out to your Brown system and so if this is coming out we don't want to break the wire at each clamp we want to run the wire through it and out over to the next one okay we don't want to break it because that's just one more opportunity than for us to have problems with our grounding system next time we're going to talk a little bit more about the lightning protection ground system that we're going to use for our target you

Channel: Frontier District

Views: 26,747

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Id: EU_hcvsXrf0

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020