Tech Talk: The Key to Proper Grounding

Shaye Koester  00:05

Hey hey, it's Shaye Koester and I'm your host and the founder of Casual Cattle Conversations, a global rancher education company that strives to bring honest thoughts and conversations from ranchers and leaders to other ranchers. Be sure to follow @cattleconvos on social media to have more in depth conversations around the ranching, business and lifestyle brought to you. If you're ready to take your operation to the next level, and improve your lifestyle to send me a message about my ranchermind group. rancherminds, are monthly roundtable discussions for ranchers to learn from peers and experts and leave a call with actionable advice to make changes on their own operations. With that, let's see who our guest is today, and what experience and what advice they have to offer you to improve your own operation.  All right, Buddy. Well, thank you for joining me on the show today. It's great to have you here and I would really like to hear a little bit about your role with Gallagher and the beef industry. Just talk about briefly what you do and share that with my audience.

Buddy Rowlett  01:11

Thank you for having us. I'm Buddy Rowlett and I'm Director of Sales for the South and the West United States. So I have eight territory managers scattered around that I help as a team to go out and call and retail or to call on farmers and ranchers. Help them with fence problems, scale problems, show a new technology that maybe will make their life a little easier. So that's kind of what we do at Gallagher.

Shaye Koester  01:41

Well, that's exciting to hear, because on this show, we're all about improving ranches and making life easier. So with that today we're talking about grounding fences, getting a good ground and ensuring that we're doing that properly so that we have the most success with our electric fencing. Would you give a basic rundown on what grounding looks like for electric fences?

Buddy Rowlett  02:07

Sure, so a lot of it depends on where you are in the United States and how much rainfall you get. So basically, there's two ways to build electric fence. When we go to the east where we get rainfall, we build an all hot system and what that means is every wire in the fence is hooked to the hot terminal on your fencer. Then you have a ground rods or rods, we recommend a minimum of three on a permanent system that are six feet long, driven 10 feet apart. And that's all no matter whether it's a hot or ground system, we want plenty of ground. Think about your ground system, or your ground rods has being like the antenna on your car. So the farther you get the radio station, the bigger antenna you need, or the more fence you build the bigger ground system you need. So that's kind of why I have farmers realize, put it all in perspective, but we need three ground rocks minimum. And then if you have a hot ground system, when you go out west where it's more arid, and you don't have the grass and stuff on the ground, then we need a run one wire that took to the hot terminal in fence and one wire hooked to the green terminal on the fence or the ground terminal, and then hook back into your ground rods as well. So any farm call we make, 80% of the time it's because it's a grounding issue.

Shaye Koester  03:33

So what would you say are some of those like, I mean, most common grounding issues. I mean, you talked about you know, a good ground and what you're looking for so would you expand more on what some of those grounding issues are that farmers and ranchers can avoid.

Buddy Rowlett  03:47

They try to use the steel post in their fence for a ground rod it's only driven in about 18 inches. your ground rod has got to be down to permanent moisture for it to conduct electricity. They use a rusty piece of rebar and just loosely wrap a wire around it and they don't have a good connection. Rust is an insulator to some degree. So we recommend galvanized rods, galvanized wire and galvanized clamps. Since you're building a galvanized fence, we don't want do not want to mix metals and get corrosion that way either. But generally they just do not put enough metal in the ground for a conductor.

Shaye Koester  04:29

All right, so when you're looking at the impact on the overall fencing structure, obviously like a good ground impacts the amount of power that's going or electricity that's going through that fencing system do you want to talk more about how that ground impacts the overall fencing system?

Buddy Rowlett  04:50

The farther you go, like I said earlier, and the drier the ground or the dry the conditions, the more ground rods you have to have. It's about the surface area of the ground rods. So when we get up to our 50-joule energizers, we may recommend 10 to 15 ground rods. You talk about rotational grazing small solar units, one three foot ground rod may be enough, if you're only going a quarter of a mile. But the more fence you build, the more grounding you have to have and good tight connections are very important. Another thing to remember, is on hot ground systems, you have to carry to your if you have a gateway, you have to carry your hot and your ground wires under the gateway, you have to connect everything back to the ground, right?

Shaye Koester  05:45

So what are some of the best ways to do that then with those gateways, because that is another step. So what are some of the methods that you recommend?

Buddy Rowlett  05:52

I recommend an underground cable that is made for electric fencing. So we get people that want to use wire that came out of an old house or off an old grain truck or something to use for electric fence wire. Well, if you look on Romex, it's rated for 600 volts. So we're putting seven 7,000 to 8000 bolts through this fence. So it's like trying to use a garden hose for a hydraulic hose. There's just not enough insulation there to contain the other thing is, you always want to protect that wire going under gateway, so you want to put it in conduit or pipe or something. As we drag through those gateways and rocks rub on that wire. Even though that insulation is double coated urethane, over years, we'll still get something puncturing that insulation. So really recommend to protect those wires going under those gateways with conduit, some pipe you've got laying around or anything just to keep from car traffic from wiring through that wire.

Shaye Koester  06:57

Well, those are all amazing and very applicable tips. So is there a way that is there a place or resources that ranchers can go to for more information on obtaining proper grounds to make sure that they haven't right the first time?

Buddy Rowlett  07:13

Absolutely. If you go to Gallagher, USA, North America and search or go on YouTube and search for proper grounding techniques, there's some really good videos that show you about grounding. You can reach out at 1-800-531-5908 and have a territory manager in your area contact you and they will walk you through the grounding or if you've got other issues we make a lot of ranch calls, no matter whether it's a Gallagher energizer or somebody else's. If we can help somebody have a good experience with power fans, we feel like it's worth the call.

Shaye Koester  07:53

Well Buddy, I appreciate you being on the show today. Is there anything else you would like to share? To my audience as they are it's pretty wide audience they're all 50 States, Canada, Australia. So is there any other tips or information you'd like to share before we wrap up today?

Buddy Rowlett  08:10

Um, you know, electric fence, power fence, whatever you want to call it, it's probably the most effective barrier we can build. I mean, we fence everything from snakes out of power plants to elephants around the world. So there's not much anything that has a nervous system, we can't keep in or out. So don't hesitate, no matter what you're trying to do. Give us a call. I was on a place last week in Texas, and we were designing a system for black rhinos. So there you nothing you've got that will surprise your territory manager when you call them and you're trying to contain something or exclude something.

Shaye Koester  08:50

Well, thank you for being on the show. And thank you for sharing all that information with us. We'll make sure that that contact information gets into the show notes so that today's listeners can contact you with it or contact Gallagher with any questions as they arise. Thank you, Buddy.

Buddy Rowlett  09:06

Well, thank you for having us.

Shaye Koester  09:08

And that's a wrap on that one. Be sure to let me know your thoughts on the episode and if you have any further questions around the topic, take care and have a great day.