Archive for category Homesteading

It’s funny, the little details you notice when you look at things long enough. I pulled these eggs from the coop the other morning, and it was pretty obvious to me that one of the barred rocks had started laying. The egg on the right is typical of the ones from the red sex-links that I’ve had for over a year now. Although the eggs are different in color, the sex-links do sometimes produce darker eggs. What stood out most was the difference in shape—the left egg is more tapered on top—and texture—the left egg has a speckled texture that the right egg doesn’t. Although the differences are really subtle, I’ve been looking at the sex-links’ eggs every morning for more than a year, and they really stood out.

No pics in this update, as I have had every last spare brain-cycle taken up by adjusting to having Dylan in the house. He’s not all that hard to care for, from a logistics standpoint; it’s just fitting my brain around the idea that I MADE A PERSON. Yeah, that takes a little getting used to.

The garden is coming in well. Carrots are going strong. Peas died off inexplicably. Squash and melons are being trained up the trellis. Cucumbers are devouring their trellis like kudzu. Potatoes are… well, doing something underground, but I have no idea what. Tomatoes have flowers, but no fruit. Onions and leeks are finally past that point where I worry that they’re going to keel over dead any minute. Lettuce and bok choy got a late start this year and are already starting to think about bolting, before they’re really even full grown. C’est la vie.

Integration of the chicken flocks is going smoothly, if slowly. The old chickens tolerate the presence of the new chickens, with only the occasional peck to remind them who’s boss. They still don’t run around the property together like a flock, but if I can get them cooped together, I’ll call it a victory. I don’t care whether they hang out, as long as they all sleep and lay eggs in the same place.

What finally seemed to work was putting the old chickens in a cage inside the new chickens’ coop at night. After about a week or so of that, I started monitoring them when they would come to the coop at night. If the old chickens started attacking the new chickens and running them out of the house, I would put them in the cage for the night and wait a few more days. Once they settled in to perching on opposite ends of the roost, as far away from each other as possible, I started leaving them out at night, but still letting them out as early in the morning as possible, so there wouldn’t be any tragedies. They’re a lot less aggressive when they’re settling down for the night and sleepy. In the morning, they’re awake, and pissed that they’re cooped up, so there’s more likely to be trouble.

Just a few days ago, I transferred all of them to the permanent coop and left them in there for a few days to try to re-home them. The old chickens, who had lived in the coop before, took to it no problem, but the new ones still returned to the temporary coop (that they had lived in for their entire life, so who can blame them). I’ll leave them in the permanent coop for a few more days, still letting the old chickens out so there are no tragedies, and try to prioritize taking apart the temporary coop. Once the temporary coop is gone, it’ll hopefully motivate them to call the permanent one home.

We’re still working hard on figuring out the intricacies of managed intensive rotational grazing. The sheep are very hard on an area if they’re in it for too long, making tracks and “camping” in a place that becomes totally denuded. We decided to free graze them in our 1/3-acre field for a time, to see how that went. Big mistake! With MIRG, that field would have taken them something like 4 weeks to eat through. Free-grazing, they wore it down in about two weeks. There were lots of really worn areas where they lay in the shade of the trees, and the entire field was more-or-less picked clean of the yummy stuff, while leaving gobs of the not-yummy stuff behind. This is bad, because the field is only doing as well as its least-common denominator. If they eat all the grass, and none of the plantain, they still have to be moved to give the grass a chance to recover. Meanwhile, the entire field is out of rotation, the plantain gets overgrown, and useful calories are wasted.

Instead, we decided the thing to do was to use even smaller areas. We had been putting them in paddocks of about 1000 square feet, which took them about 3 days to eat through. Now, we’re putting them in paddocks of about 300 square feet, which they eat through in about a day. The hope is that this will not give them enough time to wear down trails and “camping” spots. I did some tricky thinking to figure out a way to set up the electric fence so that I can move them to a new paddock every day without having to re-do the entire thing. Basically, I fold the fence in half, and then “pop out” a section of the appropriate size. Each day, I “pop out” a new section and close the old section behind them, so the open section moves down the doubled-over fence like an inchworm. Anyway, each day, I just pull up one or two poles and move them, and the sheep get a new section of grass. I only have to re-do the entire fence every five days or so, which is actually less often than I had to when they were in the bigger paddocks. I hope this works, because the damage they’re doing to the field is really not sustainable.

In other news, baby Jake has been scheduled for the processor. We knew we were going to have to get rid of him, because you can’t have two rams in the same flock without them fighting. It’s not a big deal; we want the meat! We were hoping that he would reach a market weight of about 100 lbs, but the most important thing is to get rid of him before sexual maturity. We don’t want him fighting with Buck, and more importantly, we don’t want him knocking up his mom. He’s not mature yet, but we’ve seen him mount her up a few times, and we figured better safe than sorry. He’ll be about 4 months old when he’s processed, so he should be good and tender.

In the previous post, we ran down why a test meter is useful in maintaining an electric fence, and why the Speedrite Fault Finder (and other such meters that show amperage as well as voltage) are particularly useful in locating faults on a fence. In this post, I’ll go into some more detail on how I use the Fault Finder to maintain my fence.

First, let’s discuss the normal state of the fence when it is working properly. The normal voltage on the fence will depend on the strength of the driver and the amount of wire that is attached to the driver. The more wire that is attached to the driver, the lower the voltage on the wire will be. In some cases, you may find that voltage is lower at the end of the wire, but if the wire is short relative to the strength of the driver, voltage across the wire may be relatively consistent along the entire length of the wire. Additionally, if the fence is built properly, voltage on all of the wires should be more or less the same. This assumes that you’ve got a fence with all hot-wires. If you’ve got alternating hot and ground wires, only the hot wires should show voltage. The ground wires should show zero volts unless something is bridging the wires (like an animal that is getting a shock).

For safety, fence drivers are prohibited by law from putting more than 10 kV on the hot wires, so if you ever see more than 10 kV on the wire, your driver may be malfunctioning. Putting a resistor in-line with the main lead-out wire coming off the hot terminal of the driver can temporarily bring voltage down to a safe level, but you should probably get your driver looked at by a repair facility.

For large, thick-skinned, feathered, or woolen animals like cows, pigs, fowl, and sheep, 5 kV or more is recommended. 5 kV or more is also recommended for predator control, so even if your fence is only intended to keep in smaller animals, if it’s also intended to keep predators out, it should be putting out around 5 kV or more. Knowing the minimum acceptable voltage for your fence is useful for deciding whether repairs are required or not.

That being said, any reduction in voltage from the usual value is probably worth investigating. Therefore, it’s important to know the expected voltage on the line for your driver and your fence system. When everything is working right, my driver puts about 6 kV on the line. Recently, a minor short occurred in my system that brought the voltage down to about 4 kV. This is still enough that the fence was functional, but if I hadn’t know that the usual voltage was much higher, I might not even have known there was a problem.

The normal amperage on an electric fence system is zero. Remember, the only time current should flow is when an animal is receiving a shock. If you see current flow on the line, something is grounding or shorting it out.

Now, let’s run down some symptoms, their possible causes, and some troubleshooting suggestions.

No voltage on the line, No Amperage on the line

The meter shows 0.0 kV and 0 amps.

Check the driver. Is the driver plugged in and powered on? Most drivers will have a “fence OK” light that flashes when the driver pulses. Is it flashing? You can usually hear drivers click when they pulse. Is the driver clicking?

If the driver doesn’t pass these tests, you may have a dead driver. The final test is to disconnect the lead-out wire from the hot terminal of the driver and touch your tester directly to the hot terminal. You should see a very high voltage, perhaps at or above 10 kV. (If you’re clever, you will go perform this test NOW, when your driver is working properly, so you have a point of comparison for later.) Your user manual may specify a target voltage for the bare terminal as well.

If the voltage on the bare terminal is low or absent, the driver is broken and needs to be repaired.

Next, check the wiring for continuity. Turn the driver on and hook up the lead-out wire to the fence. Starting with the lead-out wire on the hot terminal of the driver, work your way outwards from the driver, one step at a time, checking for voltage. Is there voltage on the hot terminal of the driver? Yes. Okay, is there voltage at the end of the lead-out wire, where it connects to the fence? Yes. Okay, is there voltage on the fence wire to which the lead-out wire is attached? No. Okay, you found your problem. It’s the connection between the lead-out wire and the fence wire.

Checking the grounding system is probably not called for in this case, because bad grounding (in my admittedly limited experience) usually results in low voltage, but not zero voltage. If the ground system was bad, what you might see is low voltage when you are close to the driver, and then decreasing voltage the farther you get to the driver, to a point where you see zero voltage past a certain distance. But if you see zero voltage everywhere on the line, it’s probably not the grounding system. Design of grounding systems is a topic in itself, and we won’t go into it in this post. We’ll assume that the grounding system is installed per spec and that the grounding system’s lead-out wire is attached to the ground terminal of the driver.

If you detect no voltage on a fence line and no amperage, it’s important to check the other lines as well. If, say, the 2nd line from the bottom was being shorted, you might see 0 volts / 0 amps on all the other lines and a low voltage (say, 100 volts) and high amperage (say, 10-15 amps) on the 2nd line from the bottom. Don’t just measure a single line and assume you’ve got the whole picture.

No or Low Voltage on the line, Some Amperage on the line

If you see amperage on the line, then you’ve got a short or a grounding point somewhere. With a short, you will probably see zero volts on the line, because the short is such an awesome path to ground that basically all of the fence’s pulse goes down the short. You may also see zero amps on all of the lines except the one that’s being shorted, so be sure to test all of the fence’s hot lines before you draw any conclusions.

When you see amperage on a line, the rule is always the same: move in the direction of the current flow to find the fault. As you move, continue to test the line every 100 feet or so. When you pass the fault, you will either see current flow drop to zero, or you will see the direction of the current flow switch.  At that point, you know you passed the fault. Work your way back the other direction, testing more frequently, until you zero in on the exact point where the short is. Look for something that is touching the wire and is providing a path to ground. If you listen, you may hear sparking that will help you identify the exact location of the short.

If you have a fence where half the lines are hot and half the lines are ground, a short may occur between a hot line and a ground line. In that case, you will see amperage flow away from the driver on the hot line and amperage flow back towards the driver on the ground line. This will help you identify which two lines are being shorted. The procedure for locating the short is the same.

Low Voltage on the line, No Amperage on the line

In this scenario, voltage is lower than normal, but no amperage flow is shown. For example, my fence normally has about 6 kV on the line, but recently it was putting out more like 4 kV.

One common cause of this is grass and other weeds growing up and grounding out the bottom line(s) of the fence. The reason this doesn’t cause any detectable amperage flow is because there is no single short or grounding point. It’s all along the length of the fence, so the overall voltage is reduced, but without any detectable current flow.

Another common cause of this condition, if your driver is battery-powered, is low battery. Use a standard electrical multimeter to test the voltage across the terminals of the battery and see if it is low.

A visual inspection should help you determine whether this is the problem. Is there a bunch of grass and weeds growing up and touching your bottom wire(s)? If so, it may be time to get busy with the string-trimmer! But before you jump to that conclusion, remember that it may be a short as well. Shorts typically only show current flow on the actual line that is being shorted. So, let’s say the 2nd from the bottom wire is being shorted, just a little bit–just enough to reduce the voltage on the line, but not enough to totally reduce it to zero. You measure the top wire and see 4 kV/0A. Hold on! Keep measuring. You measure the next wire down. 4 kV/0A. Keep going. When you get to the 2nd wire from the bottom, you see 4 kV/10A. A ha! Now you know you’ve got an identifiable short instead of a general “grounding out” of the wire caused by grass and weeds. Move in the direction of the current flow to find the location of the short.

Troubleshooting an electric fence can be pretty difficult. The most basic form of troubleshooting is to install cut-out switches along the fence’s length. When the fence is having a problem, you use the switches to disconnect sections of the fence. When the section of fence that is having a problem is cut out, the rest of the fence will return to normal function.

There are several problems with this method. First, installing cut-out switches all along the fence’s length adds to cost and complexity of the install. This is the least of the objections. Second, the cut-out switch method can tell you which section of fence is having a problem, but you still need to manually inspect the section to find the specific problem. Let’s say that you have nicked an insulator with a fencing staple so that the staple is contacting the hot-wire through the insulator and creating a short-circuit to ground. Good luck finding that with a visual inspection! Third, it can be difficult to tell when a fence is at “normal function” and when it is malfunctioning. You can touch the fence to feel how strong the shock is, but this is neither precise nor pleasant.

All of which means that if you’re going to troubleshoot an electric fence, you need a test meter. You might wonder why your good old digital multimeter won’t work. Two reasons: voltage and amperage. Digital multimeters are typically made to run below 400-600 volts and 10 amps. Electric fences operate at voltages of up to 10,000 volts and, if there is a short in the fence, current flow can easily exceed 10 amps.

There’s a more fundamental reason why digital multimeters won’t work to troubleshoot electric fences, and that’s because modern electric fences don’t use continuous current. Rather, they send an impulse of, perhaps, 100 ms long, once every second. Multimeters often can’t accurately measure impulses that short.

Before we go further, we should briefly define voltage and amperage. Voltage is analogous the pressure in a hydraulic system. If you’ve got a garden hose with a big pump attached to it, there may be 50 or 100 psi pushing on the nozzle of the hose, but if the nozzle is closed, that water isn’t going anywhere. This is analogous to the situation where the fence driver is sending an electrical impulse, but nothing is touching the fence. For 100 ms, there may be 5 to 10 kilovolts (kV) on the line. Lots of pressure, no flow.

Amperage is analogous to flow rate in a hydraulic system. If you open up the nozzle on that hose, now water is flowing, and we could measure that flow rate in, say, gallons per minute. This is analogous to the situation where the fence driver is impulsing and an animal is touching the fence. By providing an electrical path to ground (the animal’s body), the animal has “opened the nozzle” on the wire. Electricity flows through the animal’s body, and the rate of electrical flow is measured in amps.

It should be intuitive that the higher the voltage, the higher the resulting amperage, all other things being equal. A hose that’s fed by a 15 PSI pump will move less water than a hose that’s fed by a 50 PSI pump. But what if those hoses aren’t the same diameter? What if one of them has a little tiny nozzle with a pin-hole on the end of it, and the other one is wide open? This is analogous to resistance. Resistance is a measure of an object’s resistance to current flow. The relationship between these three variables is:

Where I is amperage, V is voltage, and R is resistance. This explains why, when nothing is touching the fence, current doesn’t flow. Although the voltage on the line is high (5-10 kV), the resistance of the air is also high (10^8  ohms per meter), so no current can flow unless something is grounding out the wire (like an animal’s body).

What does all this have to do with troubleshooting your electric fence? Well, problems with the fence will show up as abnormal values of voltage and amperage on the fence. So, first of all, you need a meter that is going to show you these values.

The meter shown above has five lights on it that blink when an electrical pulse occurs on the fence. The higher the voltage on the line, the more lights light up. This meter has a lot going for it. It’s cheap, at about $10. It’s rugged because it’s basically just an electrical circuit with some LEDs and resistors, so there’s nothing really to break. It can only measure five different voltage levels (basically, 1 to 5 kv), but that’s sufficient for most fence maintenance. One down-side of this meter is that it is very difficult to see the LEDs light up in bright sunlight, which is pretty much always when you’re testing your fence.

Here’s basically the same thing, but it goes up to 7 kV. I couldn’t say how bright the LEDs are on this one as I don’t own one. It’s about $15.

And here’s the same thing, except with a digital display. Goes up to 10 kV, runs about $40.

You may notice that all of these testers have a probe hanging off of them. When you take a measurement with them, you stick the probe in the ground to provide an electrical ground reference point for the voltage measurement. Then you touch the device’s terminal to the fence wire, and it displays the voltage. Having to stick the ground probe into the ground every time you measure can be a little annoying if you are tracking down a problem, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

The problem with all of these meters is that they only show voltage on the line, not current flow. Voltage can tell you THAT there is a problem, but it is basically useless at telling you WHERE the problem is. As we discussed in the previous post, many different things can cause low voltage on the line. Only a device that shows both voltage and amperage on the line can help you pinpoint the problem.

And that brings us to this little beauty: the Speedrite Fault Finder. This device reads both voltage on the line and amperage draw. Here’s how it works. Normally, current flow on an electric fence is zero. Only when something is getting shocked is there actual current flow. But when there is a short on the line, gobs of current is flowing down the line and out that big, slippery path to ground! A meter like the fault-finder can detect the presence of that current and, not only that, it can tell you the direction of the current flow. Basically, because problems with electric fences usually involve unauthorized current flow, by tracking the current flow, you can zero in right on the point where the fault is occurring. No guesswork, no fooling around, no spending half the day walking up and down the fence trying to figure out where exactly the short is. Oh, and that silly little probe you have to stick in the ground? Not with this one. Just hold the meter in your hand and away you go.

As wonderful as this device is, it has one major down-side: cost. It’s about $100 or more depending on where you buy it. That being said, an electric fence of, say, 1/4 mile, will cost you about $1500-$2000 in materials and equipment rental alone, and that’s assuming you do all the labor yourself. If you hire somebody else to install it, it’ll be more like $8000 (I got estimates). So, all things considered, spending an additional $100 on a test meter that can help you keep your fence running is quite justifiable. And let me tell you, an electric fence without current on it isn’t worth much, so you can’t just hope and pray that the fence is working on a day-to-day basis. When I first bought the Fault-Finder, I thought it was kind of extravagant, but I use it every time I move the sheep or the pigs’ netting, just to make sure I’m not accidentally grounding out, and I have used it at least three times in just a few months to find a short that was killing the fence entirely (my neighbor’s barbed-wire fence). So, what I thought was a luxury turned out to be an essential.

In the next post, I’ll go into more detail on how the Fault Finder is used to identify specific faults.

There’s one more thing I’d like to show you:

This little device hangs on your fence wire and starts blinking if the voltage on the wire goes below a preset threshold. You might think that if you have a Fault Finder, you don’t need this, but tell me the truth: are you going to go out to your fence and test it every day? It’s really nice to not have to think about that, and just have this thing start blinking if there’s a problem. It means that issues with the fence are solved that much faster, since we get a proactive warning, instead of having to wait to discover that the fence is not working (say, by an animal getting through it). It’s about $20-30 and well worth it in my book.

Now that you understand how an electric fence works, what are some issues that can come up with proper operation of the fence.

Insufficient Grounding

If your ground system is insufficient, current won’t be able to flow from the animal touching the fence back to the grounding terminal of the driver. The grounding rods should be 6-8 feet long, sunk as deep in the ground as possible. For permanent fence systems, there should be at least three grounding rods, installed in a straight line, with 10′ spacing between them. The grounding rods should be connected to each other with 10-14 gauge wire, insulated to at least 20,000 volts. This same wire can be used as “lead-out,” to attach the ground terminal of the driver to the first grounding rod, and then from there to connect the grounding rods to each other. A grounding clamp should be used to attach the grounding wire to the rods.

Household electrical wire is typically only rated up to 400 or 600 volts, and is not acceptable for use as grounding or lead-out wire for an electric fence. Wire rated to 20,000 volts can be purchased in the fencing supply section of farm stores like Tractor Supply Company or your local co-op.

Grounding rods are ideally made of a metal that won’t corrode, like stainless steel, aluminum, or copper. For temporary installations, rebar can be used, but it’s not ideal because it will rust, and its performance will degrade over time.

Short-Circuit

A short-circuit occurs when a highly-conductive path is created between the hot terminal and the ground terminal. For example, if you had a fence system with alternating hot and ground wires, and somehow two of those wires got tangled, a short-circuit would occur. The electricity always takes the least-resistance path between the hot terminal and the ground terminal. If you touch a wire that is being shorted, which path is the electricity going to take: through your body, through the earth, and into the ground rods, or through the electrical wire? The electric wire, of course! Since there is no electricity flowing through your body, you don’t get a shock.

A short-circuit can also occur if a low-resistance path is created to an alternate grounding system. For example, there is a section where my neighbor’s barb-wire fence runs parallel to my electric fence. Once, a broken strand of barb-wire came into contact with my electric wire. The barb-wire fence is held up with metal fence-posts that are driven into the ground. If you think about it, this is an incredibly effective grounding system. When the barb-wire touched my fence-wire, that became the preferred path for the electricity to take. Touching the fence no longer provided a shock.

The fence coming into contact with a body of water like a creek that has overflowed its banks can be another cause of shorting.

Symptoms of a short are that the entire fence appears to be dead or very weak even though the driver is working properly.

Excessive Undergrowth

Green plants like grass provide a small electrical path to ground. Just a few blades of grass contacting the the electric fence won’t siphon off enough electricity to affect the fence’s functioning, but if there’s a lot of grass and such touching the fence wire, it can effectively short-circuit the fence. What usually happens is that the power of the fence is reduced to an ineffective level, although you can still feel a tiny shock if you touch the wire. Without a test-meter (discussed in a future post), it can be difficult to differentiate between a short and excessive undergrowth. Electrically, they’re both the same problem, but with a short, there is one main point where the current is being diverted to ground, while with excessive undergrowth, the problem is spread over the entire length of the fence, one blade of grass at a time.

The solution to excessive undergrowth is to keep the grass under your fence trimmed. I run a weed-eater underneath my bottom wire every two or three months. Some people use herbicide instead, which is much less work, although it does involve laying down poisons on your property.

To combat the problem of excessive undergrowth, some people design their fence so that the bottom wire or two can be disconnected with a switch. When the bottom wires are overgrown, they’re just turned off, and the remaining wires can operate at full power. The idea here is that the bottom wires are more to keep out smaller animals that will go under the fence, while the upper wires are to keep in larger animals. An animal tends to hit a wire first with its nose or its ears or its shoulder. If you keep horses or cows, it may not matter that the bottom wires are turned off. Additionally, if the animals are trained to the fence, they may avoid it for a while even if the power is turned off (although you wouldn’t want to leave it off too long, because they’d figure it out).

Broken Wire / Connection

If there is a broken wire or connection, there will be electricity on the wire up to the point of the break, and then there won’t be any electricity on the wire after that. Frankly, because the wires are under tension, a break will probably be pretty obvious–there will be a wire hanging loose! But a break can also occur if a splice is done incorrectly; it can look good, but may not be making good electrical contact. Breaks are pretty easy to find, especially if you’re willing to touch the wire and see if it’s shocking.