Trencher
Most garden centers and many home improvement stores can rent you a trencher with an cable installation attachment. These machines dig a trench, lay the wire and then bury the wire, saving you a heap of time. If you have everything ready, you should be able to do a fairly large property (about 300 yards of boundary) in a half day. Expect a half day rental to be about $40 including gas. See for example.
The larger models are easier to use, but are more expensive and may not be able to fit in the trunk of a car. You should be fine with the smallest model unless you are doing a very large area. (e.g. over 2 acres)
They all work differently, so when you go to pick the trench, ask the shop assistant to give you a demonstration of how to operate it. Always use safety glasses!
The video below gives you a general idea of how it works. Note that the video is propaganda from EZ-Trench, and makes it seem easier than it is. Through most soils, pulling the trencher is not so effortless! Still it is much easier than doing it by hand. The trencher is by far the best way to do the job.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Before I order the innotek 4100 underground fence from you, a couple questions:
we want to fence in about 7 acres of our land in vermont, a mixture of woods and pastures– it is remote, but trafficked by deer, bear, wild turkey, etc. Even with a professional edger or wire/trencher, it may be hard to get to all the places we’d want…..1) can the wire be a mixture of underground and above ground? 2) under our dirt driveway, can i run the wire through metal conduit or would that interfere with the signal; what about pvc conduit.
any other suggestions or concerns about doing this? thank you. Charlie p.s. we will be up at our cabin for the month of august, so want to install the system soon…. however, we then visit only one or two weekends a month– will this be a problem for the dogs remembering the system? Let me know soon if you can.
ADMIN – Hi Charlie,
Hi Charlie,
(1) You can have a mixture of underground and above ground
(2) Test the metal conduit if you already have it installed. It can do odd things like magnifying the signal or killing the signal. If you haven’t installed anything PVC is the way to go, it will work every time. For a dirt driveway, have you ocnsidered not using a conduit at all and just using the trencher?
(3) You would want to give the dogs a nice chunk of continuous time on the system to learn it. (a month would work) They will remember fine after that. But it is important that you get that long chunk of time when you do the initial training. It is much harder to train them if they only have say a weekend once a week. If you ever get more than a year between visits, you may have to put the flags back up for a couple of days. New dogs tend to learn quickly from following the lead of their pack.
Can I run the wire through a metal calvert that runs the width of my driveway? It is about a foot under the road.
ADMIN – Hi Eric,
You can run the wire through a metal culvert. You may have to turn the boundary width up a little to get you through the foot of concrete to the surface of the driveway, so as long as you weren’t planning on having the boundary width be too narrow (say less than 4-5 feet) you should be fine.
I just ordered an underground fence. The company I work for will let me use their trencher, but the wire would be buried at 36 inches. Is that too deep?
ADMIN – Hi Alicia,
Afraid 36 inches is too deep. I would not bury more than 12 inches deep. Is the unit adjustable, most trencher will let you select the depth up to a maximum.
Your instructions say to lay out all the wire, make temporary connections, test the system and THEN bury the wire. I plan to rent a trencher from Sunbelt and I have a couple of questions.
After the initial test, do you disconnect the temp connections and roll the wire back up onto individual spools? Does the trencher feed the wire from the spool? From the picture, I think yes.
Do you make the permanent spliced connections after the trencher buries the wire? I’m thinking that you have to dig it back up to make the splice because the huge wire nuts won’t feed through the trencher but I’ve never used one so I don’t know. With your vast experience, how do you handle the splices using a trencher?
ADMIN – Hi Laura,
We will usually disconnect one temporary connection at a time and feed that wire through the trencher. You can leave the wire laying out on the ground when you use the trencher, just use your free hand to keep tension on the wire. Alternatively you can roll it back up onto the spool, it takes a bit more time but makes the actual trenching easier,
After burying each section, I like to redo the temporary connection and make sure everything works before progressing to the next section.
I usually bury the spliced sections by hand – you cannot run the splice through the trencher!
How do I deal with tree roots that are in the path of where the underground fence to be? (Using the trencher)
ADMIN – Hi Al,
The EZ Trench wire installers will actually cut clean through tree roots. I’m not exactly sure about what diameter the root could be too large to cut through.