Know somebody who is having trouble keeping some dogs in their backyard. The dogs are serious diggers. They are also big enough that with some effort they can break off the bottom boards of the cedar fencing to get out.
Would running some old fashion electrical fence wiring along the bottom be a fairly effective deterent? Anybody have exerience with that?
I was thinking of suggesting something like the following. Here is what the cross section would look like. F is the fence, G is the ground, and W is the wire. Wires run parallel to the ground and fence. Ignore the dots, am having trouble with my ASC art spacing.
F
F
F
F
F
F
F
F
F…W…W
F
F…W
F
F…W.
F
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
Yes a human would be smart enough to dig way under carefully and not get zapped. Seems like a dog wouldn’t be.
Yes, I guess those shock collar systems with the wire along the perimeter might work as well, but my guess is they would be more expensive (cost is going to be an issue I think) and for various reasons pehaps less reliable .
When I was a kid we had that EXACT situation, only it was one dog (half beagle half dachshund). He was hell bent on getting out, but my folks weren’t smart enough to figure out he needed his balls snipped.
The wire worked at first. Ours ran off a 12v battery, but the dog figured out if it ran out of power (and stopped clicking), he was able to escape.
He also figured out he could rub forward and remain insulated, but if he backed up, he would get shocked.
In the end, he actually climbed orange trees and would leap over the fence.
The old bastard lived to be 23 before we had to put him down.
Good luck with your plan. The moral is run AC power, have the dogs are fixed, and hope they can’t climb.
I have a hotwire running along the perimeter of my fence to keep the dogs in. It’s about 8" above the ground, to make it easy to keep the weeds down. It’s not difficult to do and it works well. You need to make sure your gates are secure, because you have to bury and insulated wire under the gates to connect either side. My charger for the yard puts out about 2000 volts. The charger I use for the pasture puts out about 7000 volts. I use a Zareba charger for the yard, and use nail-in insulators for the wooden posts and snap-on insulators for the T-posts. If your dog is a jumper, you may want to run a second wire around the top of the fence. Check Craigslist in the Farm and Garden section for used chargers.
Once the dogs are zapped a couple times, they don’t really push it.
I used electric wire for my dogs and it worked.
I put it inside the top rail (chain link fence) to keep one dog from jumping the fence. It would catch him on his belly.
Then I put it around the ground rail to stop the digging under the fence. I had one dog who would run and slide into the fence, snapping all the ties that held the fence to the ground rail. Worked for that too.
Invisible fences work great and are cheap if you install them yourself. It’s about $100 for a kit with one collar. Additional collars are about $50.
You need to rent a shallow trench digger if you want to run the wire a few inches under the ground but if you already have a fence you can attach the wire directly to it with a staple gun.
I ran a single strand about 8 inches off the ground 8 inches out from the house all the way around. The first 4 nights my wife and I heard a startled “YIP!!” around bedtime and all was quiet the 5th night onward. I left it up about a month and then put everything in storage.
All the supplies came from Home Depot though you might want a more permanent installation post wise, but one or two strands is all you would need. Your diagram is excessive for what you want to do.
