Cannot Get Electrobraid to Work

What? I’d like to know the reason for that. Other than ramm wants you to buy their special grounding kits… :slight_smile:

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Ramm offers braid with both copper or steel. I went with the steel because it had a better warranty. And I got my grounding rods at Rural King. (The sales rep I worked with at Ramm told me I was better off getting them locally because of the shipping.)

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That’s fine for the braid, but ground is ground. The ground comes off the energizer, not the fence, so it shouldn’t matter which braid you chose.

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Does your fence use the recommended “hot-cold” system where the second strand from the top is cold/grounded (connected in through the negative terminal on the energizer)?

This ensures that whenever a horse touches this grounded strand along with one of the hot strands they get a shock even with poor soil conditions. You can also run additional ground rods off of this strand in other parts of the pasture to help.

Diagram from the ElectroBraid manual showing the cold/grounded strand:
image

As others have noted you need a fence tester. The ElectroBraid manual has pretty comprehensive instructions for testing the voltage and grounding/earth return system of the fence. They also have some good videos on Youtube that I found helpful when we installed ours. I’m sure they would also help you troubleshoot if you reached out to them.

ElectroBraid Installation Manual

I have lots of electric fencing. I have an outlet on the outside of the house I can control with a light switch. My charger goes there. I buried a cable from the house under the gate and that cable brings the charge to the fence.

These are the parts that can go wrong:

  1. does the charger work?
    2)is the charger properly grounded?

If the charger is popping/clicking and working correctly and there are no problems with the ground rods, then you may need to replace the electrobraid.

If you think the charger is not working, I would replace it with an AC powered one (the strongest you can afford). Solar powered chargers tend to be less powerful.

How old is the electrobraid? Do you know when it was installed? We have had ours for 25 years and it is worn out in a lot of places. The tiny copper wires break, the polymer rope degrades with exposure to the elements, and it just doesn’t hold a charge all the way down the line. It has a life span and ours has just about reached that here. We have begun replacing it in sections. Also we found that with our clay soil, the solar charger was not delivering a strong enough shock and we switched to a main power charger which worked a lot better.

There were a lot of good suggestions mentioned above. IF you have tried them without results maybe it needs to be replaced.