Dog fence

[johnridley]

Our dog's invisible fence boundary wire has degraded to uselessness. It's been getting flaky when the ground's wet for a couple of years. It was cheap wire that came with the old cheap system we got at Lowes years ago, and the insulation degraded.

I'm now burying higher quality, 20 gauge solid, direct-bury rated wire. I've got 100 out of 1500 feet done so far. Now that I've got it figured out how I want to do it, I expect it won't take more than 6 hours or so to do the whole thing. The ground is quite soft right now, soft enough that I can simply rip the old wire out by hand and follow the same gap in the ground with the new wire, with just a little bit of opening it up with a hand tool. The first time I did this, the ground was hard as a rock and it was quite difficult, and took several days.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

If you have to do something like this again, water the ground before you dig.

K.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I did this time, it's called "wait until it rains". Unfortunately though that made the ground soft, it's actually worse, because the ground here sticks to the tools like glue. I start with an edger, within a few feet I've got a stick with a ball of mud on the end. I'm actually putting off doing a big push on this until the ground dries out a bit.

It would have been worse last time, because back then the ground here wasn't really good soil, it was clay/sand mix, which takes forever to soak up any soil, and again, turns to glue when it does. At least now the top few inches are a good porous soil.

At least half of the path I need to bury wire in is far enough away from the house that we don't have enough hose to reach there, and I think it might be faster to just dig it dry than to fill a couple of 5 gallon buckets of water and carry them hundreds of feet out, water 10 feet of ground, then walk back hundreds of feet for another bucket.