By Jade Meinzer
Electricity is something that we use every day, and we often take it for granted. It powers our homes, pumps water from the ground, allows us to send messages or make calls from anywhere and works in countless other ways. It’s not all that long ago that a lot of families were still using candles and oil lamps to light their homes in rural America. While electricity is a part of our everyday lives, it’s important to remember that it can be dangerous. When used properly, it’s a great tool, when abused it can have downright shocking consequences. Theres a saying, “Volts thrill and amps kill.” Sometimes when people get a thrill from voltage, it can be downright hilarious to watch.
One use for electricity on the ranch is powering hot wire fences. These fences work by sending a shock when the wire comes in contact with an object that is grounded. They use a high amount of voltage in a small burst to dissuade animals from crossing the fence and leaving the enclosure. Hot wire fences make great temporary fences in places where traditional fences don’t always work. Water gaps, river crossings and other places where we need to keep cattle in an area are prime examples.
When I was attending college in Hays, Kansas, I worked for the beef division of the college farm. We had a pasture about twenty miles north of Hays that we would graze in the fall of the year when the calves had been weaned. The Saline River ran through the middle of this pasture, and we always had to put up a hot wire to keep cattle from wandering away. I and two other workers loaded up our pickup with posts, wire, insulators and the fence charger. All this equipment was placed in the bed, and we took off for the pasture. We made our way off the highway and wound our way through the backroads until we reached our destination. When we got to the pasture, we began working to construct the fence across the river. At the time, I was the youngest member of the crew, so I got the job of carrying the posts to the other members while they stretched the wire and connected the ends to the corners. One of guys was out in the middle of the river attaching the wire to the insulators. He was barefoot with his jeans rolled up to his knees so that he didn’t get his boots or socks wet. The other member was connecting the charger to the fence. This is where things became one of those home videos worth big bucks on TV. During the trip up to the pasture, the charger had accidentally got turned on as it bounced around. The hot wire side was able to be hooked up without incident, but as the guy in the river had both hands on the wire attaching it to the last post, the guy at the charger touched the ground wire side to the charger. The resulting shock rendered all of us useless for a short time. The two that had been shocked were trying to regain control of themselves and I was trying to catch my breath from laughing so hard at the events that had just unfolded.
One other shocking experience occurred when my brother-in-law broke down on his way to school one morning. I picked him up and took him the rest of the way to school, then met his dad and a family friend to see if we could diagnose the problem with the broke down pickup. Fuel, air and spark are the three basic things needed for a combustion engine to work. We checked the air filter and found it to be clean. Next our friend pulled the coil wire off the distributor cap. He borrowed a wood chisel from me so he could ground out the coil and check for spark. As my father-in-law cranked the pickup, the metal strike plate on the end of the handle was firmly grasped in our friend’s hand. Turns out the coil worked fine, and it was a faulty fuel pump that caused the pickup to break down. I have no idea where that chisel landed when our friend flung it into a neighboring pasture. It was hard to see where it landed through the tears streaming down my face from the laughing fit that ensued.
The next time that you have to work around electricity, make sure the switch is off or use one of those testers that reads voltage for you. It might save you from a shocking experience. That’s all for this time, keep tabs on your side of the barbed wire and God Bless!