Use woven wire/tpost fence as electric charger ground?

[bocephus]

I have a permanent woven wire/tpost fence system. No hot lines on it at all. I just started running temporary electric netting in different areas. Currently the charger is sitting in my garage and I ran the grounding system across my yard which is less than ideal.

Could I use the wire/tpost system as my ground? I'd imagine hundreds of feet of fence and tposts would dissipate the electric quite a bit. I have an exterior outlet on a pole right next to the fence, I would just need to shield the AC adapter from rain. The charger instructions say it can be used outdoors if you shield the AC adapter.

 

[goatboy1973]

It should work just fine.

 

[greybeard]

Yes, it will work fine as long as you ensure there is a continuous run of the woven fence around corners. Some people, when they make a run of fence, cut the length and staple it up at the end of each straight run , then start again on the next straight run and the woven wire has an open gap at the corner. If so, just run a jumper across the gap.

I just ran a varmint hot wire around my brother in law's 6' tall woven wire garden fence to keep raccoons out of his corn. 1 hot wire 1/2 way up and used the woven wire as ground. Just clipped the neg alligator clip from the solar charger to the woven wire, but you could also drive a ground rod at you charger location and another next to the fence, with a jumper from that grnd rod to the woven wire as long as there is damp earth between the 2 ground rods. Even tho it is just a 1/2 joule solar charger, it showed 8kv when I tested it.

Fence energizer doesn't look for "earth ground" . There's a + potential stored in the capacitors and it looks for ground only in relation to the circuit carrying the discharge from the +terminal capacitors to the neg terminal on the capcitors.
(or vice versa depending which electrical science one happens to believe in)