Cost to operate electric fence?

[watchdogps]

We will be running some hot wire around our pastures, and my husband is grumping about the electric bill. I am thinking it should be a pretty minor increase, he is thinking it will be a lot. We only will have two half acres fenced.
How expensive is hot wire to operate?

 

[jessica117]

I guess it would depend on your box. I have the zaebra ACC2 which only runs up to two miles of fence and I have around 1/4 mile run and I saw no difference in my bill. Maybe someone else with more line run will chime in.

 

[patandchickens]

For a plug-in charger, you mean? The cost is negligable, it depends on the size of the charger obviously but they draw from 10 to 40 watts, and you will almost certainly be using one on the smaller end of that range.

So to run a small fence charger continually for a year would be the same as running a 10-20 watt lightbulb continually for a year. If you are paying, let's say, 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, then the cost would be 10 watts x 24 hrs x 365 days =87600 watt-hours = 87.6 kwh x 5 cents = 438 cents = $4.38. So, less than $10 per year for any size charger you're likely to have (and not much more even for the big dangerous sized ones)

Mind, this does not count depreciation/replacement/repair of anything, but it sounds like your husband is just concerned about the electricity end of things.

The thing is, these chargers put out very high voltage but at extremely low AMPERAGE (that's why they don't kill you!) so the wattage drawn is extremely low.

Tell your husband to google it or look at charger mfr websites if he does not believe me

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[carolinagirl]

Think of the electric fence wire just as you would the electric wiring in your house. It's just sitting there, not drawing any juice until someone hits the light switch and completed the circuit....making the light turn on. An electric fence is only drawing juice when the circuit is complete, either from an animal hitting it or wet weeds laying on it. Otherwise, it costs nothing to run.

 

[patandchickens]

An electric fence is only drawing juice when the circuit is complete, either from an animal hitting it or wet weeds laying on it. Otherwise, it costs nothing to run.

That's not really quite true, though. There are a lot of sources of resistance and loss in the system. (edited to clarify: because it's virtually-all uninsulated, as opposed to household wiring, at least post-Victorian-era household wiring) That's why even a clean well-tended fence DOES use up current/battery/whatever. Just not *much*.

Pat