Wednesday 22 October 2014

Electric fence progress

I spent a few hours in the orchard today to complete the main part of the installation of the electric fence. There's now five stands of fence wire installed and correctly tensioned mounted on suitable insulators. In total there is over half a kilometre of  wiring, 60 insulators  and 25 wire knot joints. Feeding the high tensile wire was really hard work because I didn't have the correct "bobbin" to roll out the wire. Instead I had to work from the coil of wire. The coil was constantly threatening to explode into a birds nest of wire tangle. I had to feed each inch of wire carefully whilst keeping a tight grasp on the main wire coil.

The Gripple line tensioning tool (Torq) worked superbly and made the job of tensioning the wire really straight forward. Tomorrow I'll be ordering the lead/acid  batteries to power the fence.
Five strand Electric fence at Turnditch Orchard
Electric fence at Turnditch Orchard


Edit 25/10/2014

The electric fence is connected and live as of 5 pm today. The connection process was straightforward as a consequence of the careful planning work and preparatory effort. The "hot" wire strands are interconnected at various points along the length to ensure maximum connectivity and to minimise any power leakage, The measured voltage on all strands is 7000 volts. The bottom strand will not normally be connected to the power, but will be configured as a ground wire.

Edit 15/01/2015
We were beginning to wonder if we'd wasted money and effort on the electric fence. However when we drove past the site today and noticed the sheep were back in the adjoining farmer's field. The fence seems to be keeping the sheep out of our orchard. Yippee!

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