Cannot Get Electrobraid to Work

We purchased a farm that has a decent amount of 4-strand electrobraid. We have not been able to get it to work and no fencing people want to touch it.

My husband has researched and tried replacing the solar charger, adding grounding rods and checking for faults. Nothing works and the fence will not shock you or the horses.

We live in SC where the soil is dry and sandy, which we know is terrible for electric fencing, but this is what we have to work with.

While I hate it and wish we could replace it, we don’t have the budget to do so as we have a lot of it and the prior owner spaced the posts so wide (11-12 ft apart vs 8) that we can’t add wood boards without a ton of waste.

Any advice, guidance or ideas? We are at loss and horses are starting to not respect the fencing.

When you dump out dirty water buckets - dump them around the grounding rod. That will help keep the soil there wet. Also I have found that tape fencing and electrobraid do not conduct electricity as well as plain old electric wire. I use tape fence for show and run a strand of hot wire along side of the tape and plug in the wire. I don’t use electric for exterior fence so it is not a catastrophe if they escape through the tape, although it does bug the hell out of me.

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How frustrating!

Great advice so far.

Just want to add that saying you can not get it to work is kind of vague. Do you have a tester? Is the charger(s) working properly? Where does the charge get lost?

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These were going to be my questions. Get a tester and start working your way from the charger, out.

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Good advice here already… get a tester. And put your box in a damp spot, or where you can dump water on the ground around it often.
I do not have “electrobraid”, but I do have other types of “tape” with small wires running through it to carry the charge. I bought that because I wanted it to be SEEN. But what I found was that the tiny wires running through the several different types of tape tended to “work” back and forth in the wind and with time and use, and the tape went dead. And it can’t be “fixed”, it has to be replaced. Because you have no idea where the tiny wires running through the tape are broken (the “working” back and forth in the wind etc breaks the tiny wires??? I’m guessing). So, I no longer use that sort of stuff. I have not used “Electrobraid”, but I’m presuming that it works on a similar plan. If not, feel free to ignore this advice.

I use electric wire only now. Either aluminum wire, or the steel wire… doesn’t matter. Once stung once, the horses know it’s there, and avoid it like the plague. If it breaks (and it does if a deer gets tangled up in it, or other ???), the break is easy to find if you walk the fenceline, and easily fixed, either by adding a new piece of wire, or simply reattaching the broken ends. With the other stuff, you have to replace it ALL, because the breaks are EVERYWHERE and/or tiny, so you can’t simply splice a new piece in. If your electrobraid is OLD, it may simply be worn out, full of breaks everywhere in the wire that carries the charge. If it’s new, you must have a different problem. If you want to keep the “visual” of the Electrobraid, whether or not it’s working, you could consider simply adding a metal wire which runs through the same insulators, and will carry the charge.

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You can splice in a section, both with electrobraid and tape.

If you use good quality stuff, it doesn’t flap in the wind. The only place my Horseguard tape flaps is where I have it over a 20’ gap as a temporary gate. If it weren’t for the gate handles needing a little bit of looseness, I could have tensioned that enough where it too wouldn’t flap.

The cheap farm store stuff? Yeah, it’s going to break.

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Electrobraid has really thin wires and they do break, but there’s more than one running through the braid. We never had success with a solar charger either so it was hard wired, for the pigs we had a weed burner type charger and wire.

Were your horses used to an electric fence? The pony was used to wire, tested the eb fence and got snapped, so he never chose to try it again and that’s a big part of how an electric fence works is their decision not to mess with it and get hurt again.

10 to 11 feet is what the eb folks say is good, along with lots of tension.

If I had it to do over I’d have hired a fence co and paid the money to have them drill holes in this rocky, ledge filled soil we have, then used the woven wire fence, there will always be maintenance issues for those too but having to teach the horses about it isn’t one of them.

That is another point - solar chargers only have so much shocking ability. If your fence is shorting out anywhere, you will likely not have enough to over come that with a solar charger.

Your only solution is to test sections of fence and figure out what is going on.

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My experience with the electrobraid solar charger combination at the training center we were at, one day when I turned my mare out I was a little over enthusiastic swinging the gate chain around the post and it caught the electrobraid. Almost knocked me on my ass. I felt that jolt right up past my shoulder. The owner might have had his faults, but setting up hotwire was not one of them!

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Yes, but if you had hit it again right away you might not have felt such a jolt. Where with a hard wired charger, it can handle quite a bit more loss and still be there to shock you to the point of wondering if you will ever feel normal again.

It was just another thing for the OP to look into.

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You can also call electrobraid. They were great 20 some odd years ago when I installed mine. But you can have breaks in the copper wire with they nylon braid still intact so it can be hard to find. I recommend a digital fence tester.

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I was thinking that after the first blast thankyouverymuch. I wasn’t going back for seconds! LOL I’ve hit my fair share of electric fences before, this one took the cake. I doubt any of the horses would go back for a second go either.

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our horses used the pony to test the fence, they would crowd poor old Charlie into the fence waiting to see if he bolted

I had a horse that could tell in minutes (if not seconds) after the electric fence quit working right when I was a teen. You could hear him stepping on the bottom rung of the page wire fence to get at the lawn even though he had acres of grass to graze on.

My tips for electric fencing:

  1. you said you replaced the fence charger; what mile/joule is it that you went with? You need more than you think, especially if it’s solar.

  2. check that the fence isn’t touching anything that’s grounding it. Even a wet wood fence post can do it if the conditions are right. Check every inch of the line. You might find it’s touching a gate or something. Also check to make sure your using copper wire on the grounding rod.

  3. Don’t use electrical tape on the charge box or grounding rod. This seems strange but it can impede the connection sometimes.

  4. get a tester and see if it lights up. Especially in the winter sometimes it seems like it’s not working but you’re actually insulated from the shock by your boots. Winter blankets can insulate the horses too. (I’ve said ‘this fence isn’t working!’ Taken off my shoe and received a hell of a shock more than I should admit :rofl: )

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Lots of good advice here already. Is it not hot right where it comes out of the charger, or are you losing it further away? For my own Electrobraid issues, this Fence Doctor gadget has been a godsend. It “leads” you to the direction of the short, if there is one, using light up arrows. I once spent an entire day troubleshooting a single run of about 200ft, even had my electrician buddy out, and then I bought this Fence Doctor in desperation and I found the problem in, no joke, five minutes. Worth every single penny.

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That’s super clever. They have something similar for underground power lines, I didn’t know they had one for fencing!

Me neither, until desperate times called for desperate Googling :laughing:

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Are you sure it is Electrobraid specifically? We have a different electric braid fencing from Ramm and it requires steel grounding rods and wire connections. If you have a different type of braid, the coper grounding rods might not work.
(FWIW, we love the braid that we have.)

Electrobraid is copper wire braided with nylon to make a rope product that can be electrofied.

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