Will Electric Fences Work in Dry Weather or Frozen Soil?

Goodday,

Often, we get the question; will electric fences work in dry weather conditions or in a frozen soil situation? Our answer is “Yes it will”!

Importance of Proper Grounding

First of all, your ground is just as important as the energizer. If you have a big energizer (8 joules and up) and a little rusty piece of rebar in dry soil as a ground there is a big chance the animals won’t get shocked. The reason for this is the conductivity is not good enough (too much resistance).

For our ground system, we always recommend a ground rod from 6 ft per 2 or 3 output joules. For example:

• If you have an energizer that has an output from 12 joules, then we recommend 12 / 3 = 4 rods in moist soil.
• For an energizer with a 12 joule output in dry soil conditions, we recommend 12 / 2 = 6 rods.

How an Electric Fence Works

Normally an electric fence works as follows:

1. The energizer sends out a pulse of power from the positive terminal.
2. The power travels down the fence.
3. When an animal touches the fence, it completes the cycle between the positive terminal and the negative terminal.
4. Because the power has now traveled from the positive wire through the animal, through the soil, to the ground rods which are hooked up to the negative terminal on the energizer.

All Live Fence Configuration

With an all-live fence, we mean that all the strands on the fence are electrified, this would be more the traditional way of hooking up an electric fence. Hereby we are relying on the soil to be our conductor from the animal to the ground rods. If the soil is dry or frozen the animal will not get as big of a shock if at all.

Hot/Ground return setup

Hot/Ground return

This works as follows (see image above):

• From the 5 strands of wire, we electrify 3 of the wires.
• The other 2 wires are tied into the ground system (ideally on the ground rods).

Now the system works as follows: in a dry/frozen soil condition, the energizer sends out a pulse and travels down the fence over the 3 hot wires, if an animal touches the hot wire alone and the soil is frozen/dry the animal gets a small shock or no shock. If the animal touches the hot wire and one of the ground wires at the same time the power travels from the hot wire through the animal into the ground wire which leads straight to the energizer’s negative terminal, with this hook up we eliminate the poor conductivity conditions from the soil.

Farmer’s hack and safety warning

The bigger your ground system is the better your electric fence will perform, the less problems your soil will give. One of the farmers I talked to said “tie everything steel into your ground system” he said I tie every single culvert and every cultivator or piece of equipment that is parked close enough to the fence into the ground system of my fence. He never has issues with bad conductivity.

One more story and then we will leave you to it.

One of the customers I talked to did the same thing. He tied everything into the ground system from his fence, he also used the ground plate from his pumphouse. DO NOT DO THIS!! One day he noticed the animals did not drink because the energizer was back feeding power into the water troughs through the heating elements. 

Warning: Ground rods should be more than 23 m (75’) from other grounds, waterlines, or utilities!!