Proof-of-concept trial

The short. A bare wire touching a steel fence post that is jammed into the ground. The problem is very visible in this image. It is much harder to find when the wire and the posts are rusty or a scrap of old wire that looks like a twig got pushed into a hot-wire somewhere.

An eight second video showing what was happening at the diagnostic disconnect.

I was not very clear about how this disconnect is to be implemented.

Suppose you have a mile of perimeter fence in various stages of repair. Also suppose that the perimeter fence is composed of five different wires.

The genius who installed it has a neutral bottom wire made of barbed, a hot smooth wire, a neutral barbed third wire and a hot fourth and top wire. Suppose the bottom wires are close together to deter coyotes and dogs from scooting under or through the fence.

Suppose the paddock divisions are two miles of single, hot wire but it is mounted on flimsy posts or with posts and super-long intervals.

When your energizer informs you that you have a short, you have over a mile of perimeter fence to walk and two miles of paddock division wire to walk and you might not see it the first time. You have to inspect five miles of wire.

The way I envision these gizmos being used is to use the top wire as the "power bus". The top wire is typically the wire most resistant to picking up ground trash or tangling with another wire. That is, it is the wire LEAST likely to have the short.

The other wires will be fed from the power-bus wire.

Conceptually, you want to break the fence into separate runs of approximately the same degree of risk-for-of-shorting.

The wires with the highest risk of shorting...the first hot wire with a neutral barbed wire above and below it...would be broken into shorter runs and each run would have a single feed through one of these diagnostic gizmos. So if you had a mile of perimeter fence you might break up the bottom wire into four, discrete runs.

For runs that are a lower risk of shorting...the paddock divisions and the middle hot wire in the hypothetical five-wire fence...you might feed the entire run through their own unique diagnostic gizmo.

So, on that night when you have a short you can drop out the middle wire.  Was the short in the middle wire? NOPE! Great.

Is the short in the paddock divisions? Drop out that diagnostic gizmo. No sparks? Good!

Then, you would walk the perimeter of the fence and drop out the run of bottom wire one section at a time until you found the run that "sparked" or ticked. You found the run of fence with your problem.

Without some diagnostic method you have five miles of wire to inspect. With the diagnostic, the worst you will have is two miles if it is in the paddock divisions and that wire is usually very visible.

Let me tell you, your ability to find a short is 100 times better when you KNOW it is in a specific 1/4 mile run of fence than when you are racing around looking at five miles of fence where it might be.

The only way to do it by checking voltage is to drop out the run and check the main fence to see if the voltage got higher. You are trying to follow current, not measure voltage.