Is This the Cure for My Fence Problems?

hi i'm pete and welcome to just a few acres farm the fence saga continues let me bring you up to date we're going to take a little ride here i've been doing a lot of work and i'm going to show you first i got to go through this gate though yeah it's close enough there we go i've been all the way up this swale first with the sickle bar mower then with the weed eater the fence is spotless now i've been down all these lines between pastures cleaned everything off the fence checked all the posts these guys are unhappy because the grass that they got in here is not exactly the best that they would like to eat and of course they want the best but they're gonna have to wait it's all spotless now i weedied it all through here along the pig fence all the way around all the way down the line here and for those who thought that weed eating would be quicker than using the sickle bar more it took me hours to go through this it took me about a half hour to go up the swale with a sickle bar mower and i got a seven foot swath out of that and even despite all that every time i check the fence it's exactly the same 2 000 volts which leads me to think that weeds on my fence aren't the problem because no matter how many of them i clear it doesn't make a bit of difference i also went all the way around the pigs fence i raised it where i needed to or they'd push dirt into it i cleared everything off of it it is completely clear now i went all around these fences with the weed eater all down these fences around here went all the way around this field nothing so up until now my solutions to the fence problem in short haven't been shocking i've isolated sections of the fence you know i've dropped off sections to try and localize the problem no change nothing the only other thing i can think of is going around walking and grabbing each post and seeing if i get a charge out of it to try and find out if there's a ground out somewhere other than that i've checked it all over today's been a rainy day and i got to commentate about this problem and i want to try something as you can see the fencer's behaving as usual no blinky blank except once in a great while i think it's getting worse so let's try something here i'm going to take the ground lead off the wire that goes to the grounding posts outside the barn got a zap there now the fencer blinks every time and if i go outside the barn and i put my voltage tester on the pig fence here you would think i should get nothing right because i've disconnected half the circuit the ground's disconnected from the fencer but i'm getting about the same reading i did is when the ground was plugged in so i think i have a ground problem and it all clicks for me now because i realize even when i had the fence perfectly cleaned off in the spring i remembered i was getting low voltage readings then i'd forgotten until i had this rainy day to think about it and further i remembered that when i put in the ground rods pig barn wasn't there i built that later on i ran the ground rods off of this corner of the barn and put at least two in i think only two this fencer really needs three but i think i put in two because i have a smaller fencer well the pigs have been rooting right around where the ground rods are and also i did some modifications to their doorway last winter so that i could push moisture out of their pen and i may have cut the ground wire this little gale keeps getting out come on in you go i got to do some work in here let's go no don't go in the pig barn there you go so i went to my local ag trek and i bought three eight foot ground rods and i'm going to put them in we're going to see if it makes a difference i kind of think it will and this time instead of burying them outside where i can't see them i'm going to run them at a diagonal out from inside the barn so they're in contact with moist earth all the time and i'm going to leave the top so i can see the wire connections so i can make sure that they're still connected and clean up the connections as needed for maintenance i got to rock here sooner or later pro tip install the clamp before you finish driving the pole so that when the head mushrooms out from beating on it you can still get the clamp over the bar now i'm into the rocks the scrap metal's all got to go to the scrap yard but i happen to have in here a roll of nine gauge wire left over from another fencing project and it'll make for a nice thick conductive ground wire that end right on there yep just cut this to length then hook it onto this ground post like i said this fence are supposed to have three ground rods i only installed one but we're going to give her a test and look at the voltage now see if it changes dirt on the plug spiders still very few blinky blanks and the tester says between two and three thousand volts that's about the same as what i had before but i've only driven one ground rod so next i'm going to come over here about 10 feet from where i drove the first ground rod i'm going to drive a second one just got to get this stuff out of the way where's john henry when you need him oh not here now i'm going to run another wire from the first round to the second ground here and i'm thinking with two rods it should make a difference all right let's try her now huh that's not what i expected let's check the voltage here again it's higher it's reading 4000 volts now lighten up the five sometimes but this is what i really don't understand so the fencer's all hooked up if i put the probe from the tester into the ground and then i connect it to the fencer's ground i get a reading every blink of about 2000 volts looks fainter than the main fence but it doesn't seem like there should be current going through here unless it's returning from a ground in the fence to the fencer that may be yeah maybe that's what i'm sensing here well let's drive in the third ground rod and to do that i'm gonna have to move all these fence posts out of the way the whole thing mystifies me never had a problem like this oh i must have hit a big rock holy cow i think i passed the point of no return though [Music] boy oh i'll try tilt near this thing what's that [Music] it just doesn't make sense to me that i'm getting juiced to the ground because the tester's plugged into the ground the ground rods plugged into the ground the juice must be coming from the fencer that doesn't make any sense unless i got a bad fencer huh well we'll finish this job and see gosh darn it i hit another rock ah all right third ground rod is in i just need to run the wire fish it behind these fence posts so secure it to this ground rod ground rod number three secure the other end of ground rod number two when i was an architect and we did big buildings there were huge grounding grids for the buildings just a grid of rods very big and there was always a protocol for how you ran the wires as far as having to double up the wires and have a continuous wire each just for extra insurance that you didn't have a bad ground someplace along the line but it's just an electric fence so i just jumpered the lines one to the next instead of a continuous and i guess this is the moment of truth all three are connected yeah i got something else going on here let's look at the voltage again same spot on the fence it's up to 6 000 volts now i just don't understand why there's juice coming through the ground i'm going to take the tester out in the field next and we'll see what we're getting out from the fencer not right next to it this spot out here by the stock tank remember when i tested it before it was 2000 volts let's see what it is now 1000 volts that didn't help i have removed so much vegetation off of the fences fixed all the shorts that i could find and it still hasn't improved the fence at all so i don't think that's my problem i think it's got to be inside the fencing unit itself especially considering that charge i'm getting going to the ground rods that's not right okay so here's the deal i just spent 20 minutes on the phone with the top fencing expert i would consider it empire fence he's north of us a little ways i bought the fencer from he knows everything there is to know about electric fences what i have is called a dead short and the reason i'm getting voltage back up through the ground wires is because the ground is actually it's completing the circuit so i've got voltage coming out of the red post 3000 volts i've got it coming into the ground back through the ground up through the ground wire at 3000 volts that's why i'm getting the same voltage any place i measure in the circuit because i've got a dead short i can't find it i've been all the way through the fence some of it multiple times so next step is i have a fault finder coming that i ordered a couple days ago and i'm gonna have to wait for that to come and meanwhile i'll keep looking for shorts i guess i've got shorts on too so i guess i found one of my shorts or a pair of my shorts anyway anyway i'm going to keep looking until my fault finder comes and um the cows and the pigs are fine with 2 000 volts on the fence they don't go far the pigs certainly they won't they've touched the fence they still squeal so i thought i was going to solve it in this video but this is real life i guess it's not a neat story anyway i hope you enjoyed this i hope you learned something i'm learning something every day with this fence i'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 90,099

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, fixing fence, clearing fence, fence, fence grounding, cure, fence problems, electric fence, install fence ground

Id: cGb-uu89gN8

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021