So, you guys know I'm a big fan of hi-tensile electric fence. Put ours up several years ago and haven't had a moment's trouble out of it...until just the other day.
We had a group of four kids -- always the same four -- who continually just walked right through it to graze the good stuff on the other side. Not great, but meh...they love their mamas, so they don't go far.
I checked the voltage..uh oh..like, 600v. I could take hold of the wire and not feel a thing. Basically non-existant.
Off I go, to investigate. The thing's been so trouble-free that I had sort of...ahem...slacked on any kind of maintenance at all, to the point that I hadn't laid eyes on entire sections of it for like a year or more.
Working my way toward the back of the property, I found three different points where the hot/ground wires were right on top of one another, and another section where the bottom hot wire was laying tight to the ground for about 50 feet. Fixed all that.
Got to the top of the hill in the very back and found one more section where hot/ground were touching. I pulled them apart, but the hot wire was laying against the trunk of a tree.. Fence was basically fixed at that point -- enough to throw a big fat blue spark at about 1/4" distance -- but I had to get it off that tree.
Problem was, I had to go through the fence to fix it. Luckily, there's over 2' of distance between the 3rd wire and the top wire (9" intervals), so it's usually not a problem to shimmy my way through -- provided I'm careful.
So...one leg goes through and the upper ground wire's laying right across my back. And, ya, it's the actual ground wire...the ground rods are hooked to the ground wires which then run back to the ground lug of the charger, specifically so that anything which touches both a ground and hot makes DIRECT CONTACT with no need for the charge to travel through the earth and all that jazz.. It's basically the same as touching the hot and cold lug of the charger simultaneously, which will pretty much blow your hat off.
So, I'm straddling the lower two hot wires. And, yeah, the fence is FIXED at this point...a 50mi charger on about 2mi of hot wire. Very hot.
BAM...5500+ volts, right to the sack.
The jolt was bad enough, but a shock that big is more or less a whole-body experience regardless of the point of contact....for a few seconds anyway....until the burning sensation sets in wherever you touched the fence.
Which, again, in this case WAS MY SACK. Lower right quadrant, to be overly precise.
The good news is that those four kids mysteriously stopped escaping within about 12hrs. Plus, one half of one day's work and a HORRIFIC, MIND NUMBING shock to the sack is still a pretty small price to pay in terms of fence maintenance, especially considering how long I'd let it go..
So there's that.
We had a group of four kids -- always the same four -- who continually just walked right through it to graze the good stuff on the other side. Not great, but meh...they love their mamas, so they don't go far.
I checked the voltage..uh oh..like, 600v. I could take hold of the wire and not feel a thing. Basically non-existant.
Off I go, to investigate. The thing's been so trouble-free that I had sort of...ahem...slacked on any kind of maintenance at all, to the point that I hadn't laid eyes on entire sections of it for like a year or more.
Working my way toward the back of the property, I found three different points where the hot/ground wires were right on top of one another, and another section where the bottom hot wire was laying tight to the ground for about 50 feet. Fixed all that.
Got to the top of the hill in the very back and found one more section where hot/ground were touching. I pulled them apart, but the hot wire was laying against the trunk of a tree.. Fence was basically fixed at that point -- enough to throw a big fat blue spark at about 1/4" distance -- but I had to get it off that tree.
Problem was, I had to go through the fence to fix it. Luckily, there's over 2' of distance between the 3rd wire and the top wire (9" intervals), so it's usually not a problem to shimmy my way through -- provided I'm careful.
So...one leg goes through and the upper ground wire's laying right across my back. And, ya, it's the actual ground wire...the ground rods are hooked to the ground wires which then run back to the ground lug of the charger, specifically so that anything which touches both a ground and hot makes DIRECT CONTACT with no need for the charge to travel through the earth and all that jazz.. It's basically the same as touching the hot and cold lug of the charger simultaneously, which will pretty much blow your hat off.
So, I'm straddling the lower two hot wires. And, yeah, the fence is FIXED at this point...a 50mi charger on about 2mi of hot wire. Very hot.
BAM...5500+ volts, right to the sack.
The jolt was bad enough, but a shock that big is more or less a whole-body experience regardless of the point of contact....for a few seconds anyway....until the burning sensation sets in wherever you touched the fence.
Which, again, in this case WAS MY SACK. Lower right quadrant, to be overly precise.
The good news is that those four kids mysteriously stopped escaping within about 12hrs. Plus, one half of one day's work and a HORRIFIC, MIND NUMBING shock to the sack is still a pretty small price to pay in terms of fence maintenance, especially considering how long I'd let it go..
So there's that.
I guess you could say it was a shocking experience then. 
