FENCE WARS - The SHOCKING Conclusion

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hi i'm pete and welcome to just two acres farm this is part four of the just a few acres fence saga and in this video i'm going to show you a scientific approach to isolate and fix faults in your fence does it require expensive tools and all kinds of gadgets probably not no it doesn't first of all i want to refresh you all on what i've done so far i started at the start here three videos ago i tested my electric fencer and to do that it's really simple disconnect the wire going out to the fence disconnect the ground put your fence tester across the two posts and see what kind of voltage you get i had good voltage or be quiet i'm trying to do a video here well that's ordained in the barn the next thing i did was i made a test loop this loop that goes around our winter pasture fence that's on top of the woven wire is the first place the fencer feeds when it comes out from the barn i isolated all the rest of the fence off of this test loop this little test loop and tested the voltage on the fence i got full voltage 7000 volts plus so i knew my fencer was good and i knew that it came out from the barn without grounding i had full voltage next i hooked the entire fence back up and i cleaned areas of the fence that had heavy vegetation on them like this one cleaning the vegetation off made very little difference i had 2000 volts before i started i had 2000 volts after i did it and that fits with my experience that when you have low voltage on a fence that's rarely just vegetation it's metal to metal someplace and lastly in a hail mary unscientific move i put in a new ground three eight foot galvanized ground rods yes that's what they're supposed to be for a fence spaced it ten foot apart hooked to the fencer it was a hail mary i didn't know if it would work i was suspicious of my ground outside the barn it didn't work now as i said i'm going to use scientific method to find all my problems with this fence and i'm going to start with an analogy an electric fence is like a pump hooked to a pipe and the pipe is one long run with a plug in the end of it if your fence is perfect there are no leaks in that pipe and the pipe is the wiring in your electric fence there's no leaks in that fence that pipe so when the fencer charges the pipe it's full when a cow or a person comes along and touches that fence then the fence discharges its whole charge into that ground and sends the current back to the fencer by the grounding system on the fence what happens if you have leaks in the pipe or grounds in your fence be it from fence post bad insulators vegetation whatever is they make leaks in the pipe and then when you've got leaks in the pipe you don't have as much water pressure or voltage coming through to shock the animal or the person when they touch the fence so in essence what we're going to do is we're going to go and find all the leaks in a measured way maybe with titus's help now then the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to measure voltage on my full fence connected and it doesn't really matter where i measure it in my experience the voltage is fairly constant across the length of the fence so let's do that and i'm using this fancy thing you don't need to you don't need one of these things you just need a voltage tester i use an old el cheapo one and it works just fine i am measuring 2.7 kilovolts or 2700 volts 2 700 volts okay that's on the full fence pay no attention to this amperage and direction on the meter here really all you need is a straight voltage meter less than 20 bucks at any tractor supply store next i'm going to split the fence roughly in half by removing this jumper that goes between the two halves of the fence what i've just done is i've made that half of the farm dead all that fencing is dead disconnected this half of the farm over here still has live fence and now i'm going to test the half that's still live remember i just care about voltage here it's jumped to 3.5 kilovolts and remember it was 2.7 before i should be at least 5 000 hopefully 7 000. this tells me that i have faults and groundings on this side of the fence as well as on the other side of the fence because it improved when i isolated it but it didn't get great oh my gosh yep that's the bulls trash talking each other one here one over in the barn i didn't mention it but this is a perfect day for testing fence because we got a really heavy due last night and everything is wet good short weather knowing now that i have more than one fault in my fence i'm gonna drop back and i'm gonna isolate it to a quarter of my farm the winter pasture loop in this field over here where we have the chickens and turkeys all i got to do is disconnect this jumper and this jumper come off there now take a voltage reading on the fence that remains i still got a problem and that directional finder is started it's telling me i got a whole lot of flow coming out from here someplace there's a fault beyond this hey turkeys you're talking a lot this morning next i'm going to drop the fence back to just the original winter pasture loop by disconnecting the turkeys in this field here and if i get shocked it'll only be the tenth time today oh that's a snap come off there now i have just this simple loop of pasture coming out from the fencer in the bar in there and going around my winter pasture that's all just this one wire up high now let's read the voltage on this fence remember you can just use a simple tester 10.4 kilovolts i expect that's maximum fence voltage now i'm going to start to look at the amperage i only see 0.2 amps reading and no directional error what does that mean that means i eliminated all the leaks in my pipe because the bigger the leaks and the more the leaks you have the higher the amperage reading is going to be on that fault tester remember back there when i disconnect when i was still disconnecting i was getting amperage readings in the 70s lots of leaks 0.2 i consider to be a pretty much leak-free fence so again i've confirmed that my fencer the wiring from the fencer to the fence and my winter pasture are all good now we can start building things back up now i'm going to add back in the last quarter of the farm that i dropped off so now it's just going to be winter fence and one quarter of the farm and it's popping real good and i can already hear a short down the line because i've increased the voltage so shorts are going to become more evident it'll arc further winter pasture loop and one quarter of the farm i've got leakage see 18 19 amps and my voltage is dropped from 10.7 down to 4.7 i got problems in this quarter can you hear that it's right down there let's start by just following the sound of the snap something's going on here right there see that ark it's one of those dinged wedgelock insulators wow that's an ark you know what i think is causing this ark bird poop let's take it it's off no work i'll bet you all guessed that bird poop was my problem right no no next pop where is this one coming from look at that right there it's one of those dang tubing insulators look at that wow [Music] luckily i brought my full bag of tricks with me everything i need and unfortunately i'm gonna temporarily use these guys t post fences are cheap and they're fine when you're doing a run or a simple corner i have never found the best way to do end terminations on them and i know people have mentioned using old garden hose and things like that but i would like to find and i thought i'd found it in these a good insulator for end connection certainly the wedge locks are better than this tube so i'm going to replace the tube with a wedge lock and probably get shocked which keeps me awake there's the hole in tube i don't know if you can see it but this ain't the first time i've had this happen i'll just keep my hand away from that hole and probably in at least an inch away oh man the fence is hot now i'm happy maybe it's that electroshock therapy however having disconnected this i can hear the next arc down the line [Music] you know you go out and you buy fancy and really all you need is your ears and an el cheap after all i've read now is voltage up till now anyway i may need the fault meter for finding fine faults but these gross faults finding that happened again you know i could go and turn the fence off but where's the fun in that getting shocked somehow puts me in a better mood in the long run i don't know what it is i'll replace these two later but i just want to get through the fault finding part first by the way here's the teeny tiny hole in that tube that caused the ark my fence is like the national power grid it's been added on to over time and cobbled together is subject to frequent outages and breakdowns these are part of the problem winding fence around like this instead of using crimp connectors like i started out doing i've got the leakage down to just about nothing on this quarter farm now and it was all in these funky terminations that i got all around the grove and one of my plans hopefully if i have time is to replace all these t-posts with wood posts and wire mesh fencing because it's just a pain dealing with all these kids this is the worst calf abuse area because the cows lounge in here and the calves run through the fences and the insulators get damaged so at this point we've diagnosed and repaired a quarter of the farm's fencing and the next step is to bring it back to half the farm and see how the reading changes and to do that i'm going to reconnect this jumper all right we've built it back up to half the farm [Music] four point three point eight three point nine amps leakage seven thousand volts anything above seven thousand is good in my book and i'm really dying to get out of this cattle lounging area because frankly they're driving me nuts now i'm going to come back to pretty much where i started i'm going to hook up the other half of the farm via this cable or wire that goes underneath the laneway and connects to the fencing on the other side it's dropped down to 5 000 volts and 0.2 amps of leakage this can confuse the heck out of you and sometimes just don't look at it the real key is my voltage is dropped so i know that i have leakage along the line on the second half of my fence so the next step is to break the second half down into a quarter and see if i can isolate the leak next since this is an underground line that joins both half it runs right under my feet here and i buried it about 1 16 inch deep drive over it with the tractor all the time cows step on it starts over there where i hooked it back in comes in and hooks in over there i'm gonna disconnect that line and test the line to see if it's leaky let's take it off here now if it's okay i should read the same voltages i was reading before with this fence isolated off which was around 7000 volts 7.2 so i'm good this wire here is good it's not leaky hook that back up so the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to drop a quarter of that fence off so instead of full farm being energized we're at three-quarters farm being energized because i've isolated it to just this half i know this half is good and i've got two fields here i'm going to drop that lower one off so this is energized all of this is energized and we'll find if we have any faults just in here [Music] i've already got this field isolated here because this gate is open so we just need to go down to the corner there and disconnect the wires there oy sure is nice having a clean fence line it's worth the work and here's our jumper location this jumper right here connects this field this little field to this field here so i'm going to drop this field off of the live fence circuit but first i want to get a comparative voltage reading that's showing a big fault heading that way and i'm only getting 4000 volts now let's disconnect it disconnect it now this fence should be dead and it is dead and this fence still shows low voltage so i've got a problem someplace in this little field here that i need to suss out i know this fence is weed free because i've been all along it up and down the swale over around the pig pen over there so it's got to be an insulator to a post i can hear an arc you probably can't it's coming from over there hear it more of those dang plastic tubes sounds like this top one and i left all my fencing parts way down the other corner so i'm gonna have to hoof it back and bring the tractor back you know ever since i got those heavy shocks i've been in such a good mood it's like my whole day turned around the only side effect is there's little sparkles at the edge of my vision i'll live with it i'll take that all right here we are back again and this is a freaking mess but it's right there see that ark hole in the tube what a mess what i may wind up doing is for all these end posts just go into wood posts and then i can do the terminations a lot neater use better insulators and put another one of these things on until i find a better solution oh we don't want it that way we want it this way you know what i can hear another short over there we'll go look after i finish this hear that look for the ark right there wedge lock insulator oh man ain't it funny that i'm putting new ones on while the old ones are going bad that's not cool that's quite an arc though i got good voltage it's just wetness i think it's just dew that's collected under here that's creating a path to the post let's leave that for now all right now i'm gonna hook this back up which means we'll be back to three quarters of the fence on the farm being energized and see where we're at yahui 71 7200 volts very little leakage we're moving right along here using science does have its advantages now that we're most of the way through the fence i'm going to go back to the head and back to the fencer and look at how much amperage is being drawn right off the fencer and that'll give me a better idea of total leaks on the fence leaks in the closed pipe remember and very gratifyingly now i have blinky blink on every pulse see i still have a lot of amperage total draw so that means i still have a collection of leaks in the pipe that are drawing a lot of amperage but even now my fencers back to being plenty hot enough to keep the cattle pigs turkeys whatever in 7 000 volts is a good zap look at this guy he's digging to china did you find anything no relics of my ancestors in that pit look at that hole it's got to be 18 inches deep must be something good down there now then since we have three quarters of the farm running about 7 500 volts we'll go back down and hook up the fourth quarter and see where we're at here we are there we go what's the tester show on the fourth quarter yep wow we've got a big draw someplace on this quarter that is a big draw drop the voltage down 3000 volts i haven't seen an amperage draw like that anywhere else on the fence so let's go looking the disadvantage to driving looking for faults is i can't hear the pop pop pop of the fence but i can drive through these areas like this straight line where the chances are kind of small that i'm going to find the pop and stop and examine the corners and the gates which is where i expect to find them now we're coming down to the lowest section of our property and it's the furthest distance from the fencer way up there and this is where i see the most voltage drop but i have to remember that part of that is because it's making the longest distance back to the ground on the fencer from here so it's natural that you're going to lose some voltage through the resistance of the ground and the added resistance of the wire going all the way down through here look at all this alfalfa that's growing in this field wowie this is where i expect to find the problem this is a mess i've had problems with this corner pulling up despite it being braced because there's so much tension on the fence going down this long line in this long line and it's come out again it's been this way for a little while next spring i'm gonna come in and put a braced wood post in here to hold that tension but meanwhile we've got this mess of wires that have kind of come out of position and it's holding but barely and i'm sure the problem someplace in here i don't hear any popping but i do have right here a gate wire that's folded back onto that pole back there that's grounded on the fence on the fence post so if we just slip it in here for safe keeping for now and then see what our gauge says that brought it up some but i've still got a draw on at some place let's just check these posts and see if there's any voltage running through them not really if i had the ground wire with me for the tester i think that that would probably go away it's just a function of its imprecision someplace up the line here i have another problem we'll track it down i can hear it ticking hear that just a grounded out wire from the gate needs to be brought off the ground and to fix this problem i'm going to remove titus to fix this problem i'm going to actually remove these gates because they need to be redone when the fence was at low voltage the cows went through them and that's why i can't string them up on the post anymore so i'm just going to remove them and i can redo them later here comes titus oh here's something that's patently not true if you leave your fencer on all the time it'll burn the weeds away so that you never have to worry about clearing weeds that's not true imagine a zombie movie where hundreds of zombies are rushing at you and eventually no matter how strong you are they overcome you well that's what it's like it'll knock weeds back for a little while but when the growth really starts in late spring it'll overwhelm the fence i've seen it it happens years ago i don't think they still make them they used to make what's called a weed zapper fencer which was better at killing weeds but for some reason i don't think they're around anymore because they were dangerous something about uh those weed zappers aren't available as far as i know all right i got those gates off now we're looking at the full farm fence 8 300 volts 0.2 amps i can't ask for anything better than that 8 300 volts 0.2 amps at least at this spot again the amp thing can be useful but the voltage is what i really care about 8 400 volts i think our mystery's solved but there's only one other thing that i have to do the thing i have to do is look and see what draw the turkey fence is making it was arcing here and i think that was creating voltage drop i'm going to tighten up this connection here where the wire comes onto the clip so that it doesn't arc anymore these things are kind of a pain to work with but i can do that now we're going to check the winter pasture fence before we hook in the turkey net we've got 7 800 volts 0.2 amps flow pretty tight pipe then hook the turkey fence back in this gets moved every week with the turkey so it's just a temporary connection now let's check the fence with the electronet on it wow it drew it way down 4 200 volts interesting can you hear that ticking behind all the turkeys noises these electronet fences are designed with a bottom wire that black wire there that is non-conductive but everywhere up from that is conductive so what's happening is because the grass is tall it's grounding against this bottom wire and that happens inevitably all the way around this i got to looking at this carefully and you can hear that pop right i thought it was just general ground out to the grass but it's not look right down here the bottom loop of that charged wire is right out it's actually transmitting through the ground is into the ground post the metal ground post of this fence and it's grounding out the whole fence so let's take care of that all right fences disconnected i'll show you what's going on just pull this up see that white wire that's touching the post at the bottom of the fence that's grounding out the whole fence so let's fix that should be a simple fix there we go put it back together hook on the turkey fence here what do we get now with the turkey fence hooked in 4.5 we still got an issue and when i come over here i can still hear a pop where's it coming from let's just mess around in here and see if we can get it to go away it moved down there now so walking all the way around this electronic i can't find a localized source of that kicking i just think it's grounding out all the way around it i'm just amazed that it draws that much voltage out of the fence but that's a lot of wire in contact with ground and the grass is still wet so it is what it is if you really care i haven't used the amperage function on this very much but here's how you would use it if you were um here's the turkey lead going out to that bad electronic so i've got 39 amps draw on that or 34 amps draw and the direction to the fencer is this way so juice is coming out this way from the fencer and it's telling me that the draw is this way which is this lead coming off now if i go to the other side of the lead i don't have a lot of draw on that side so that's how you isolate a fault tells me the faults right there and of course that leads to the electronic luckily the turkeys are only going to be out here for they're getting big three weeks maybe maybe a month and then all this fence will come down and we'll be back up to full power well well that's it and the results are quite frankly shocking personally shocking i might add after today's experience it's been really rewarding and if i just given my problems to somebody else it wouldn't have been rewarding and i would have had more money out my pocket if i started swapping things out desperately trying to find a problem i would have had a lot of money out of my pocket so i learned a lot and you know it's this is this is kind of a theme in farm life you figure out ways to do things yourself and in the end it makes a better life for you it makes a more self-reliant life and i didn't need any i really didn't need this this thing was i don't know it's like 110 i didn't need this i mean i used the voltage function of it was nice because i could see it instead of steering into my little cheapy tester but i could have used a cheapy tester to do this and it would have went just the way it did the secret was to bring the fence back down to that small size and then start building it back up because once you bring it down a small size and you get the voltage way up those arcs and those pops start to become discernible you know you can hear them and go and find them and see them and then to gradually add sections back on troubleshoot each section as you add it on use a volt meter for comparative analysis before and after so you can see exactly how you're doing give yourself data and that's it i mean it sure does beat just throwing money at a problem you know oh my fencer's bad oh i did this my ground is bad i needed a new ground anyway that one had been in there for enough years buried where i was worried about it now i have the peace of mind of that but it's kind of like fixing the car i mean some people fix a car and they'll just start throwing parts at it and you really need to do proper diagnosis first so i hope this whole series was informative like i said this is real life you can either knuckle down and power your way through these things or you can give up if you knuckle down and power your way through it's so much more rewarding may the force be with you and i'll see you next time oh and a couple more things in total there were about a dozen faults metal the metal on my fence that i found over the three days i found that vegetation on the fence didn't really change the voltage that much and they were all simple faults bad insulator wire touching a post simple things to fix just had to find them

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 97,507

Rating: 4.9719858 out of 5

Keywords: farm, farming, hobby farm, hobby farm guys, hobby farming for profit, homestead, how farms work, just a few acres farm, life on a farm, day on the farm, slow farming, busy day, farm day, dexter cattle, troubleshooting electric fence, pigs, fixing fence, clearing fence, fence, fence wars, using fault finder, diagnose fence, scientific method

Id: AO1AMnD61sQ

Length: 30min 12sec (1812 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021