We arrived home tonight from Disney World after a day in transit to watch General Conference at the parents house - it was nice decompression time, but since all of our schedules are so out of whack I'm afraid we may have been quite disruptive there. We got back on the farm around 7:00pm or so and immediately discovered that, though the cattle were innocently grazing in their pasture, they had been out roaming around the yard while we were gone. They had left "sign" all over the place. By the way, "sign" is like code for gigantic piles of cow dukie.
I quickly discovered several spots where they had walked through the electric fence and fixed them, but it was obvious that there was some other problem area that had allowed them to escape in the first place so after fixing the obvious stuff, I hopped on the motorcycle and cruised the fenceline looking for problems. I have started to turn this activity into a science - I disconnect the fence into sections and sequentially unhook/hook-up the sections to isolate the problem area so I don't have to search the entire fenceline with a fine-toothed comb. Anyway, it didn't take long to find that the problem was the area I hit with the front-end loader before we left while mowing with the tractor. I had broken a ground line which was draped over the "hot"line and was shorting it out. The fence was still on and I figured that 1) the ground line would be safe to touch anyway and 2) that even if I got shocked, it would be a diluted shock. Well, that figuring wasn't so good and so for the second time in my life, I got shocked by a very healthy 5,000 volts and let out an involuntary howl that I am sure would have been quite entertaining had you been blessed with an opportunity to witness it. I had grabbed the two ends of the broken ground line (one in each hand) and one of them was still touching the hot line when the shock came through from one hand, through my body, and over out the other hand. It was an shocking experience.
So the fence is now fixed up and tomorrow, when the cows decide to try to wander again, they'll reap the benefits of their curiosity with a good howdy-doody.
It is nice to be back home.
3 comments:
{chuckling} There has got to be a better way to test just HOW hot a line is. Maybe bring a chicken along and chuck him on there first? Can you sprinkle water on it like a skillet to see how hot it is? OR, here's a thought, there's got to be some kind of technology that would tell you that kind of thing!
howdy doody indeed!
Actually, I do have the little gizmo for testing it - that's how I know that I got the full 5K volts. The problem tonight was that I wasn't expecting the ground wire to touch the hot wire as I worked to fix the damage. I could have avoided the shock by going all the way back up to the shop to unplug the fence, but that is a long way from the area of the fence I was working on. If it was a question of getting killed (rather than just getting a major wakeup call) I would be more careful with it.
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