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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] electric flood gates

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  • From: Mark <mpludwig@facstaff.wisc.edu>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] electric flood gates
  • Date: Tue, 06 Aug 2002 12:45:33 -0500

At 09:19 AM 8/5/02 -0400, you wrote:
The western side consists of 70 acres of bottom land alongside a pristine
creek that for the most part is a gentle, ever flowing creek about at least a
foot or so until fed by rains when it can get much deeper, and wider and
become a raging torrent if extremely heavy rains fall in a short period of
time. Creek just flooded over top of banks, and over fence lines this past
May 17.02 and dropped tons of debris including numerous downed logs some over
3' in diameter. Lots of decaying material but it's all caught in fence line
or simply where dropped in field.

You need some electric flood gates. where fence needs to cross a creek, put a single strand of good quality, heavy, smooth fence wire, ideally with it's own strainer, spring and a disconnect switch. tie to this pieces of good quality polywire and tie a nut or some such weight to the dangling end of the line. Space the drops about 6 inches/20cm apart. a dab of hot glue would hold them in place, though it's not essential. power the thing through a resistor made just for the purpose, limits the amount of electricity that can flow to it so you don't ground out the system in a storm. The poly wire should be able to float on top of most junk. The fence packs quite a wallop when grounded through the stream. My first one kept my neighbors starving heifers out of tall grass all summer.


Mark P. Ludwig
Poultry Research Lab
University of Wisconsin -Madison
608-262-1730 WK
608-846-7125 HM





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