Fence!
After much back and forth, consternation, worrying, aborted plans, and research, we decided to put up an electric fence for the horses. We needed more area for them to roam and while we want to do a nice permanent fence at some point, time and money just weren’t going to allow that to happen right now. I found a good deal on used fence chargers and T-posts, and the relative ease of putting up a large electric fence made the decision for us.
The project started with an afternoon of pulling the T-posts out of the ground at someone else’s farm, followed by spooling up a few thousand feet of wire. I got about 75 T-posts, two fence chargers, a fence tester, a couple hundred insulators, large wood posts, and various other supplies all for about $90, which was a great deal. I also found an old electrical box at the dump which worked out perfectly to protect the fence chargers from the weather. I decided to use both chargers – one for the top line of tape, and one for the bottom wires – so that if one failed or one wire strand was shorted out, at least one strand would still work.
It took about two partial days to lay out our fence lines, mow and weed whack, and drive all the posts. We put the corner posts in, and then stretched some string between them to get the line posts straight. I discovered that posts drive much better when you let the weight of the post driver do most of the work instead of trying to really ram it down on top of the posts. Delia helped me dig the holes for the wooden posts, and I used my $2 post hole digger I got from the garage sale in Hastings the day we picked up our goats. We didn’t use concrete. We just tamped the dirt down around the posts, and they feel very nice and solid. 3 ground rods is recommended. I bought two and I’ve only driven one in (that was a chore!) and it seems to work fine. I’m definitely going to do the second one just to be safe and maybe even a third so that I have a good chance of it continuing to work when the ground freezes. If we notice it not working as well in January, it’ll be too late to drive another rod.
It’s mostly rectangular except for one corner cut out of it to go around the pond. The long dimension is about 330′ and the short is about 175′, which works out to about 1.5 acres. It goes west a little past the pine trees in our back yard, north to about 20′ from the garden by the pond, east to where it starts to get swampy, and south to about 15′ from the tree line. I left room all around it to be able to drive the tractor or truck. We have one gate near the barn. In the future I’ll want more, but that’s good enough for now. It’s 49 T-posts and the one big wood corner post with the gate on it. I know it’s 49 posts because we had 50 post toppers and luckily I had one left when we were done and didn’t need to go back to Hibbing for another bag of 10. Emily and Delia helped walk around and attach all the insulators. I started to unroll the wire I collected and found that it was a lot more kinked up and bent than I thought it was. I worked for a few hours on cutting out the kinks and re-splicing, but then decided it wasn’t a good use of my time when a new 1/2 mile roll of fence wire isn’t all that expensive. $50 for that saved me probably 6 hours of work and gives us a stronger and much nicer looking fence. We decided on poly-tape for the top strand for visibility. We wanted poly-rope, but the tape was quite a bit cheaper and almost as good. The tape is so lightweight that I was able to run that around myself. Emily helped me with the wire. That part of the job was very easy and we got it done in less than an hour.
The two fencers just barely fit in the box I got from the dump. I mounted some wood in the back of it with t-nuts in it so I can easily attach and remove the two fencers. I drilled holes in the bottom for the wire. I attached a bit of treated 2×4 to the wooden gate post and then bolted the box to that, and ran the wires down to one insulator for each fencer, and then I have them going to the actual fence wire with jumpers with alligator clips on the ends.
It works! I used my tester all around it and it all checked out. I also tested it with a piece of grass and got a good jolt. Cowboy touched it and acted like someone had just shot him. Sancho has gotten zapped a couple of times and he startled a bit, but didn’t seem too bothered. Foley has run under the low wire many times and doesn’t seem to have ever gotten zapped. Same with the goats. It’s not really meant to contain them at this point, but if we want it to we can just add another wire to the bottom. Cosmo touched it with his nose and jerked his head just a little, and then promptly touched it again with his nose. That makes me think I need a little more juice. That or goats are really dumb, or don’t conduct electricity well. I haven’t touched it yet, and neither have the kids. We’re going to turn it off when the kids are out playing.
The horses have spent the whole night in the pasture and haven’t escaped. It’s so much fun to watch them roam and run around. They were really bored being in their little paddock all the time. Today I put Brad in there with them and it was peaceful. I thought there might be some battles, but they did fine. They kept their distance though.
