Subject: Re: Touching Electrified Fences

From: [email-masked] (Rolf Aalto)
Date: 17 Jun 1994 18:39:29 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Edward L. Karrels <[email-masked]> wrote:
>In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (David Farmer) writes:
>> How dangerous is an electric fence?
>
>Can't be that bad.  I've touched one.  In fact, it wasn't bad at all
>and I hung on for a few seconds.  It wasn't a constant flow of power;
>it only came in brief pulses.

You must have touched a poorly grounded weak older model fence.  The modern
ones are far more nasty, so be careful!

I run a horse boarding business and I have a 2 joule low-impedence electric
fence which puts out about 15k volts.  Since I am always working on our fences,
I occasionally get zapped, which, I assure you, is quite unpleasant even when
I'm wearing rubber boots and standing on dry concrete.  If the wire is clear
of weeds, the fence will easily shoot ~.75 inch lightning bolts (if any physics
nerds want to do the calculation, remember our Washington air tends to be on
the very moist side most of the time, so it's breakdown voltage per unit
distance should be much lower than dry air).  I have seen horses standing in
water get hit by the fence -- you would be surprised to see how fast an 1000lb
can accelerate !! Once hit, an animal never gets too close to the fence again.
Electic fences are about the only thing cattle respect -- they's lean hard on
anything else (barbs just keep them from leaning hard enough so they snap the
wire).  

The fence won't kill you, but if you're not wearing rubber boots (which I
mostly do), it will knock you off your feet.  I have heard of farmers hooking
up their fences to 120v AC, but I suspect that is a rural legend, as it is
far too dangerous and stupid.

I haven't tried pissing on my fence and don't intend to. If anyone else wants to
try, I suggest that you videotape it and submit the results to America's
funniest home videos.  There was a raging arguement about this a few years
ago on alt.shenanigans -- some people claimed that their "research" with a
strobe light indicated that a urine stream broke up into individual droplets in
only a few inches from the "nozzle," so there was not a continuous electric
path.  I suspect that even closely spaced droplets would easily conduct a
15kV current which can jump almost an inch if necessary. So the only real way to
determine if the fence-pissing story is a rural legend is to run a set of
controlled experiements -- any volunteers ???   :-)

Rolf Aalto