Ready to buy electric fencing

I am ready to buy some electric poultry net fencing for my chickens and I'm wondering if anyone has any tips?  Maybe some good prices in the US / Canada?  I'd like to go with Premier 1, but it's so expensive...

Premier 1 is probably the best poultry net you can buy.  It's lasted years for me, so it's been well worth the cost.  Make sure you have plenty of spark(don't skimp on your fence charger) and ground the heck out of it.....you won't be sorry!

I absolutely agree with Dave. You pretty much get what you pay for. I own two 100' rolls of premier 1 poultry net with the double spikes that go in the soil and three 100' rolls of shorter fence going around my garden (rabbits). I have friends who have owned the same for many years also. It holds up well to time and the elements. Yes, squeeze together the money and upsize the charger if you can. you'll thank yourself in two or three years when you go to add more fence. absolutely do go to the store and purchase a large copper plated ground rod. The zinc plated rod that comes with the kit is a) short and doesn't go very deep, b) it corrodes as the years go by. And use both of them. Sink the other rod a minimum of 6 feet from the other, and connect the two with some solid core maybe 10 gauge copper wire. My buddy who also raises chickens/cattle and has this fence is an electrical engineer by trade. He told me basically half of electric fence problems can be associated with inadequate grounding.

If your birds are in a chicken tractor and you move them about your land (as I do) get a roll of wire from premier 1 to use as a lead to connect the fence to the charger. I bought one 100' roll of it and is plenty long enough for my uses. The reason I say this is premier 1 has a wire that's coated in a 10,000 volt jacket (insulation), and you can lay it on the ground without the spark energy jumping thru the jacketing grounding out instead of going to the fence. Most the wire you find at the hardware store has 600 volt jackets around the copper/aluminum conductor and is inadequate for the 10kilovolt pulse that the charger sends thru the wire. It will ground out (unless suspended in the air with poles) and it will zap the tar out of you if you touch it even though it's insulated. Their 10kv jacketed wire I bought had bare ends, so I had to solder connector clips to the ends. The other option if you're moving your chickens about, is to sink ground rods in various places and just move the energizer and connect to a different ground. If your chickens stay in one place, then there's no need for any of this (though I still recommend a longer copper clad ground rod). Like Dave said, you won't be sorry. Invest in quality once so it lasts. Hope this helps!

I have a question about electric net fencing, as I've never used it before. Is it mainly used to keep the chickens in, or is it used to deter predators? I'm curious because I live on a small island and we don't have many predators here (mostly raptors, and a fence wouldn't do much good against them!)

It's all about keeping the predators out. Chickens won't wander so far they lose their way home.

Premier 1. most cost effective alternative for electrified fencing.
EXCELLENT customer service. These folks use and reserach what they sell.

https://www.premier1supplies.com/poultry/fencing.php

I was going to go with their more expensive 48" Permanet fence and the person saved me big bucks,
advising that the Poultrynet Plus was enough for our use


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someone i know has had Kencove for only four years and the plastic strands have broken into lots
of pieces.I was handling that Kencove fence earlier today, and those plastic parts are mostly 'toast'.

The step in parts and metal spikes are bent, and awkward/frustrating  to deal with.

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I invested in 300' of Premier1 Green PoultryNEt Plus with teh extra posts and DOuble SPikes.
was told that it ought to last about ten years.

The main purpose is to keep critters of all sorts, neighbor/stray dogs & cats, predators out
of a chunk of our yard, which leads to the garden area. Dogs were running through eroding the hillside,
and i couldn't sit outside peacefully.

This Premier 1 boundary also gives myself and my service cat, Daisy, a parcel of yard in which to hang out,
even if it is too steep to run around in! i invested hundreds of dollars to claim a bit of yard for us.

And i can take it with me when we move on. instead of--well you know.

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Since i already had galvanized steel 5'conduit. i used four (instead of just three recommended for this setup) to set up the
ground system. tamped them farher into the earth than suggested.

For the energizer decided  to go with a plug-in energizer which comes with adapters to be a solar chatger.

https://www.premier1supplies.com/list.php?mode=list&species_id=ALL&search_cat_id=&criteria=chargers