Electric poultry netting/fence

[kerrylhanley]

I am ready to purchase some electric fencing for my birds but have a few questions that I could use someone's knowledge before making the investment.

1) Is Premier the best/cheapest place to buy? Their prices seem competitive, but some say to purchase the electric unit somewhere else, like Tractor Supply.

2) Is it worth the money to go with the Poultry Net Plus, with the stakes at shorter intervals to prevent sagging, or is it just as easy to supplement the places that sag with stakes bought from a hardware store?

3) Likewise, double stake or single stake? The cost difference isn't much between these two options of going with the standard Poultry Net, and double stake seems easier to drive in. We do have rather hard, clay soil. Also the kits that Premier sells come with four extra posts, is this the way to go?

4) Solar vs wired charging unit. Solar seems more convenient, but some say it's not worth the price and doesn't electrify the fence as well. It wouldn't be very difficult for us to run a wire, but for use in other areas like enclosing our pond (which is far from any electric), we would have to go with solar.

5) What size electric unit is needed for poultry? I'm sure Premier can answer this question, but would like some anecdotal evidence of what works and what is overkill. Also Premier sells the kits, which seem like the only difference is the electric meter. Is there anything else included in the kit?

I am firstly looking to enclose my existing coop/run with electric netting to make it more predator-proof, and also provide the birds with a large area to free range safely, so the cheaper I can get the fencing the more area I can give them. I would probably change the shape of the enclosure slightly to mow, or might leave it in place and use herbicide to keep down the weeds, so it would be semi-permanent.

I live in upstate NY so I'm concerned about the winter. Do you have to take it down or can you leave it in place and shut off the electric, hoping that the birds and predators have learned to avoid the fence by then? Will it ruin the fencing if it is left out all winter?

Secondly I would like to enclose our pond with electric fencing and keep our ducks and geese inside the fencing with several duck houses for shelter.

Thirdly, we might wish to replace our existing garden fence with electric netting for better protection from nibblers in the summer.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be very helpful.

 

[Egghead_Jr]

Premier has the better fencing. Purchase the fence kit and it includes four stouter corner posts which are invaluable. Your biggest management of netting is to keep it from grounding. Crummy posts, too long of spacing and what have you makes for a sagging fence that grounds out. Premier has better fences and with the package the added corner posts help a lot. Don't get me wrong, it will still sag with time but then it's time to mow and your going to nudge the entire fence over while mowing to move back or just keep moving it back and forth each time you mow. This weekly or biweekly activity gets your netting tight again.

Solar is unreliable here in the North. The combo solar chargers break in a year. I'd stay away from solar. You can use a battery or direct plug or even get a unit capable of doing both. Patriot is the best combo unit I've seen. Have two of them. P5 and P10. The P5 is the 0.5 joule unit and enough to keep out most predators. My 1 joule P10 runs off a marine battery and is connected to the electric around bee hives. I purchased my P10 from eBay for $119. There are cheaper units but I wanted a dual use (AC or Battery). If you have bear just take your feed away each night and they wont bother your birds. A P5 did deter bear from my bees first night before the P10 arrived but would not rely on that low of power for such a large determined predator. The difference is 6 K maximum volts vs. 8 K maximum volts. Doesn't seem like much but it makes all the difference for large bear and hollow haired goats.

Snow in the North is a problem. A person here on BYC just unplugs their netting when snow accumilates. Idea being the animals are trained not to go near it already. I take mine down and have a winter pen. There is another option for netting and wish I knew about it before purchasing mine. Pos/Neg netting can work in snow I heard. Call Premier1 and talk to them about it. They have excellent tech talk service.

I went with the dual pins. Not sure if it helps much more than a single stake. Soil types will vary the result. The softer the soil the more stake in ground you want so it doesn't move as much and sag the fence grounding it out to lose potency.

A cure for sagging is to just use a Y stick, literally cut a branch and poke in ground to hold the netting up in a high point of ground where it's touching.

You'll want a hotgate eventually. They are really nice for one hand easy access to pen and a few heavy duty posts to boot.