DIY Electric fencing - any thoughts?

The idea is to keep animals in or out, not to kill them!

You can buy a good one from agricultural suppliers, mains powered, which should keep the foxes away fairly well as long as the fences are high enough to prevent jumping over. It is much easier and probably safer than trying to make one. They give a couple of kV, but are unlikely to kill the fox. For that you need a shotgun!

If you electrocute a fox then you might also electrocute a person, that would be murder or manslaughter, murder is contary to common law. A fence to physically keep em out might be a better idea, and perhaps a few noises too

0.22" LR basic rifle and a cheap scope will solve your fox problem out to 50 yards - don't let the little one play with it, it's not a toy


They will dig under most fences and if they can't they'll go over - I've seen the buggers inside substations that have 8 foot high electric fencing on the inner line - and it bloody hurts to touch that


Failing that, do you know any old school chemists ?


Regards


OMS

Agree that a home made electric fence is most unwise and almost certainly illegal.

Purchase a ready made electric fence kit from a farm supplier.

In general an electric fence should not form your boundary but should be erected inside the existing boundary.

Foxes are challenging to keep out with an electric fence, they can jump low fences or slink under the bottom wire of higher fences. Only the snout, ears, and the paws are vulnerable to an electric fence, the thick coat is sufficiently insulating if dry. Foxes are intelligent and are good at finding ways around fences.


A physical barrier may prove more effective.

Foxes can be killed with a shotgun, but you will need a shotgun certificate and approved secure gun cupboard.

Buy one of those ultrasonic pest reppelers that will keep the foxes away without hurting them

The only sort of electric fence that would be legal is the sort that delivers short energy limited shocks, and would not kill a person. These normally look rather like a car ignition circuit, in that there is a transformer of sorts with the secondary connected to the fence and the ground, and the primary is pulsed, usually with a capacitor discharge circuit that is then refilled slowly between pulses.

You need several KV to reliably get a decent shock through glancing contact and fur, and you also need a pulse that is very short duration compared to human heart beat so that you do not cause fibrillation and death. Pulse energy of a few joules per zap maximum.

Even if you did not care about killing humans, and you should, there are legal implications to what is equivalent to mining or booby trapping a house, bare mains will not generally kill a fox, you need a lot more volts to be sure.

It is not a simple or very safe DIY task and unless your time is free, it will cost you a lot less to go to your local farmers merchant and pick up a commercial model on which all the safety testing has been done. examples

You also need to keep the fence earth contact well away from mains and telecommunication wiring and earthing. Pulses of even a just  few kV getting onto the earth of all your electrical equipment is not good for you or it.


Over time both the child and the foxes will learn ways to get through it or round it without being shocked.

Some years ago I read the death by electrocution statistics and reports for Ireland and there were a surprising number of people killed by people installing DIY electric fences.


There's nothing vaguely sensible about the proposal and it will not work anyway. 



This is a bowling club local to me, they have a conventional electric fence installed, I presume it is intended to keep foxes and badgers off the green to stop them ripping the turf up looking for a meal, which I think is unlikely to happen because the grass is so well maintained that there won't be many grubs and larvae under it. 

Makes me wish that I hadn't bothered with an RCD!


Those critters will get anywhere. ?


As OMS says, a .22 will do the job nicely. Best if they are suppressed - don't want to upset the neighbours who feed them. Problem with elimination is that there are plenty more where they came from. The only solution AFAIK is brick walls with deep foundations. Or live in the countryside where they are not tolerated. ?