Just curious what everyone else prefers when jumping - octagon wooden poles or round wooden poles? I’m looking to buy some and I’m not sure which is better?
I prefer the octagon ones and they need to be heavy so they won’t roll when they drop. I use 10 fts for personal use. Easier to move around.
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Modern synthetic materials are so much easier to look after and much lighter to move.
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I have a set of homemade PVC poles (& standards) that are almost 25yo.
Granted, they’ve been unused for nearly 10 of those 
But we used 10’ lengths of 1/4" PVC pipes & they’re heavy enough to stand up to use as cavaletti & ground poles - where they get stepped on - but light enough so I can easily move 2 at a time.
I make my own jumps so, Octagon. I don’t have the machine that makes them round, I just use my circular saw to rip off the corners.
Also, I like the octagons because they don’t roll as much when they drop.
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I assume you mean 1/4" wall thickness, so like this?
IPEX 4-in x 10-ft PVC DWV Foam Core Pipe 29.401 at Lowes.com
And they don’t shatter when a horse steps on them?
Yup.
& No, still intact & have been stepped on & stored in my unheated indoor for the last 20yrs.
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Interesting, thank you. I’ve seen several nasty injuries from a shattered PVC pole, but probably they were using thin wall.
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I’d heard that about them too.
But, at the time, it was just me, DH & a couple friends using them.
We did make bases for the standards (PVC 4X4 fenceposts) from wood 2X4s & weighted the bottoms of those standards with sand.
In hindsight, we should have filled, then sealed the bottoms. Instead we’d just shovel sand in when we set them up
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lol hey, if it works, it works!
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An instructor told me once to avoid rounded poles because they could roll and cause injury if horse stepped on it.
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For affordability and personal use I like landscaping timbers (sort of an oval shape with two flat sides, so they don’t really roll). They are cheap, available at any landscaping or home Reno store, and are 8ft (or maybe 10?) so they are lighter. I’ve never had an issue jumping a “narrow” jump (8ft wide), in fact it makes the super wide jumps at the show feel very inviting.
For a professional use (boarding or lesson program, show facility), the round composite material poles the shows use would be my ideal.
Same. Big fan of landscape timbers for at home jumps - just painted my second set of them (had some as a teen on the family property, that got given away when I moved for my first adult job and my parents sold the farm; now prepping a new farm so new set of jumps!). I did have some PVC poles too that I used as ground lines, but they were too light for me to be comfortable using as actual jump poles, although filling them with water or sand and capping them would be one way to address that.
I have been building jumps for forty years and made wood octagons and also used PVC. I much prefer wood. PVC pipe tends to sag in the jump cups and if you leave them out in the sun that way for a while that sag becomes permanent.
On the other hand wood poles cut from 4x4 lumber tend to twist. But that can be minimized by carefully selecting the lumber and eliminating those 4x4’s that are cut from the center of the tree. The quarter sawn pieces work much better but out of an entire pallet I usually find fewer than a dozen 10 or 12 foot 4x4’s that are suitable for jump rails.
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Then what do you use for poles? Do you laminate two 2x4s?
If that question was addressed to me, no, I use single 4x4’s. Lumber mills typically seem to make 4x4’s out of the center of the tree . But some are enough off the center so that they fall into my quarter sawn category. Those are my Holy Grails of jump pole lumber.
Any 4x4 with concentric rings on the end I don’t buy to make jump poles.
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I use round for jumps and either square or octagonal for groin poles. I want the jump rails to fall easily if we knock them (better to simulate the show ring), but I want ground poles to stay where they are. I also usually use rail raisers for ground poles, or I use foam rails when possible.
I’ve seen way too many PVC poles shatter to ever use anything but wood.
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I will not use pvc poles for jumps. I have seen them not respected too many times.
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My preference is always octagons. I have a bunch of the pvc-coated-wood rails (which are round), and I like them for simplicity (and the fact that you don’t have to paint them). But I love wood octagons most of all! So for me wood octagon > pvc covered round rails > round wooden poles
Thanks for all your responses 
I was going to use pvc poles as ground poles in front of jumps - or would I be safer to use wood? I feel like octagon is safer in the way that if you hit them and they drop they won’t roll, but I feel like the round is also safer in the way that if you hit them they come down easily - between the two I don’t know which one is the overall safer choice, I feel like they are both safer in different ways. We have a lady who is going to start making the jumps we ordered this week and she sells them both in the round and octagon styles - she’s waiting to hear back from us to see what we want, I honestly always thought jump poles were round I never really paid attention until now.
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