Mrs

[Eggasperated]

I love my electric fence but the weather this year is making it hard work. The constant rain and then occasional warm days make the weeds around it grow at a phenomenal rate; hardly a day seems to go by without me having to crawl round some part of it clipping away at the weeds touching the first live strand, and with 75m of it it's not a 5 minute job. In previous summers there's always been enough dry days to enable most things touching the wire to die off but this year it seems to be a constant battle to keep wet foliage from reducing the fence voltage .

 

I have also had several toad and frog casualties, which is a bit upsetting but I suppose I have to weigh that against the safety of my girls.

 

Moan over - sunny today, must enjoy it while I can

[Ain't Nobody Here]

It's a shame that it's such high maintenance but I suppose there's no point in having it if you don't keep it in working order . I know the weeds are making my veg patch hard work too .

[JS1]

I have also had several toad and frog casualties, which is a bit upsetting but I suppose I have to weigh that against the safety of my girls.

 

We had that problem until we erected 'toad fencing' (basically garden edging) round the outside of the fence. It's a bit of a pain and makes the gas strimming etc take longer, but I hated finding the froggy/toad casualties.

 

As an aside, one of our bits of fencing disintegrated and I asked my dad if he had anything that would do for toad fencing. He misunderstood and thought it was there to protect the chickens from toads! I pointed out that the shoe was very much on the other foot.

[Eggasperated]

Think I have finally found the problem with my electric fence: on Friday night the voltage on the fence suddenly dropped away (at bedtime getting dark ), after swapping all the leads over and changing the battery we decided it could only be a problem with the energiser.

Saturday morning rang Hotline Fencing but of course they are not there at the weekends, anyway OH made an emergency dash to the agricultural supplier and bought a new energiser (£140 ) and immediately the fence is far better than its been for a long time, so I can only assume the energiser has been breaking down for quite a while and that's what was causing the fence problems.

 

Today Hotline rang back and are hopefully going to repair the original energiser so we'll have a spare for a back up.