A gate that gives you a shock when you touch it — when it should not — is almost always picking up an induced or leaked charge from the nearby live wires, or a wire has sagged or shorted onto the gate's earthed metal. It is unpleasant and, on a freestanding installation, a safety and compliance concern. We trace whether it is induction or a genuine short, then correct the routing and clearance of the gate-area wires and ensure the gate metalwork is properly earthed so it cannot hold a charge.

We also check the alarm output and the wider line while we are there, because a gate fault often coincides with a marginal earth or a disconnected alarm. The result is a gate you can use and touch safely, with the fence above and around it doing its job.

Every other metre of an electric fence sits still; the gate section moves several times a day, every day, for years. That movement is why the gate is statistically the most fault-prone point on the whole perimeter. Contacts wear, leads flex and fatigue, brackets loosen, and alignment drifts — all concentrated at the one place the circuit has to bridge a moving gap. Add that gates are usually metal and earthed, and you have the ideal conditions for shorts, induced shocks and movement-triggered alarms.

It is also the point an intruder is most likely to target, since the gate is the obvious access route. So a gate section that is shorting, alarming on every use, or not carrying the pulse beyond it is a double problem: it is the bit most likely to fail, and the bit most important to have working. Getting the gate right — a clean bypass, correct earthing, sound contacts and proper clearance — fixes the part of the fence that does the most work.

The gate repays a little regular attention more than anywhere else on the fence:

No single factor damages electric fences in Johannesburg more than the power situation, and it is worth understanding because it shapes both why fences fail and how to protect them. During an outage, a mains energiser switches to its backup battery and the fence keeps pulsing — exactly as designed. The damage comes not during the outage but at the moment power is restored, when the grid often returns with a voltage spike. That surge travels into the energiser's power-supply stage and, on a board with no surge protection, punches straight through sensitive components.

This is why so many energiser failures appear in the hours after the lights come back on, and why a unit can survive many outages and then die on one. There is a slower, parallel cost too: every deep discharge during a long outage ages the backup battery faster than its rated two-to-three-year life, so heavy load shedding tends to wear out the battery and stress the board on overlapping timelines, producing dead fences, beeping and false alarms.

The defences are inexpensive relative to the damage they prevent: a surge protector on the supply, an intact and correctly-earthed lightning diverter, and, for properties that keep losing units, conversion to a solar energiser that runs off its own panel and battery and never sees the mains spike at all. We fit surge protection as a matter of course on board replacements, because protecting the repair is part of doing it properly.

None of these involve touching the fence wires — never test an electric fence by hand. They are quick checks that sometimes save a call-out and always help us help you faster over the phone.

Not every electric fence fault is an emergency, and knowing the difference helps you act sensibly. If you have found a cut or pulled-down wire, treat it as a possible intrusion attempt: alert your armed-response company first, keep people and pets away from any loose, possibly-live strand, and call us to repair and re-test — including confirming the alarm actually reached your monitoring. If the fence is simply dead, weak, beeping or nuisance-alarming with no sign of tampering, it is not a 999 situation, but it does mean your perimeter is compromised, so it is worth sorting quickly rather than living with it.

Either way, do not try to investigate the high-voltage side yourself — no touching the wires, no opening the energiser. The safe, useful things you can do are all observation: note the symptom precisely, when it started, and whether it follows a pattern (after a power cut, only in rain, only at night). If you can do so safely from the ground, a quick photo of the energiser's display and of anything obviously wrong on the line is genuinely helpful.

Then call or WhatsApp us for a free telephonic diagnosis. With the brand of your energiser, its status light or screen message, and the symptom pattern, we can usually tell you the likely cause and an honest price range before we travel, and bring the right parts on the vehicle. Close to our Broadacres base that often means a same-day, single-visit fix; further out we will give you an honest planned time. The two minutes you spend describing it accurately is what turns a repair into a one-visit job.

An electric fence is a high-voltage system. A healthy energiser delivers a pulse of several thousand volts, and while the design is intended to deter rather than injure a healthy person, the high-voltage side is not something to probe, open or repair without the right knowledge and equipment. The safe checks we suggest are deliberately limited to things you can do without touching the wires or opening the unit — looking, listening and noting — precisely because everything beyond that belongs with a technician.

There is a second reason beyond personal safety: a fence worked on incorrectly can be left non-compliant, under-performing, or falsely reassuring. A botched earth, a wrong-rated energiser, a join that becomes a short, or an alarm output left disconnected can all leave a fence that looks fine and protects nothing. We carry the test equipment to diagnose properly, the stock to repair in one visit, and the knowledge to leave the system both safe and genuinely working — backed by a six-month guarantee, which a DIY attempt cannot give you.

Every job starts with a free telephonic diagnosis. Tell us the symptom — the pattern of the alarm, the status light, whether the fence is dead or weak — and we will give you the likely cause and an honest price range before anyone drives out, so there are no surprises. The call-out is from R450 and is waived when you proceed with the repair.

On site, we diagnose with proper test equipment rather than swapping parts and hoping: open-circuit output at the energiser, earth-return voltage, and directional fault-finding along the line. We repair before we replace, and where a replacement is genuinely the better value we say so and explain why on the numbers, never on pressure. Because we carry the common stock on the vehicle, most faults are fixed in a single visit.

Then we re-test the whole system — output, earth and the alarm — so you leave with a fence that shocks properly and warns you if it is breached, not just one that has had its immediate symptom silenced. Every repair carries a six-month guarantee, and you deal directly with our team throughout: no call centres, no commission-driven upselling.

This is one of a set of electric-fence guides — link each to the matching page on your site:

Electric fence faults do not respect property type, and neither do we. On freestanding family homes the typical work is vegetation shorts, cracked insulators, surge-damaged energisers and tired batteries, fixed quickly and guaranteed — the bulk of everyday residential call-outs sit here.

On townhouse complexes and estates the systems are usually multi-zone, so a fault can be isolated to one section without dropping the whole perimeter, and the Certificate of Compliance for common-property fencing is generally the body corporate's or homeowners' association's responsibility — so we coordinate with the managing agent and report properly. A maintenance contract often makes sense at this scale.

On commercial and industrial premises, detection matters as much as deterrence: the priority is that the fence genuinely alarms to monitoring or armed response when it is breached, and that the work is documented for insurers. We verify the alarm output, integrate with alarm panels where needed, and service to scheduled windows so cover is never down during operating hours. Whatever the property, the same honesty, testing and guarantee apply.

If you are selling your property, or you have installed, altered or replaced the energiser, you may need an Electric Fence System Certificate of Compliance. It is a separate certificate from the ordinary electrical COC, it is required for property transfers and for new or altered installations, and only an installer registered with the Department of Employment and Labour may issue one — confirming the system meets SANS 10222-3 and SANS/IEC 60335-2-76.

Routine minor repairs such as replacing wires, insulators or bobbins do not trigger a new certificate, but replacing the energiser does, because it materially changes the system. We will tell you honestly which applies to your situation, and can arrange certification through a registered installer. This is general guidance, not legal advice — for a property sale, confirm the current requirements with your conveyancing attorney.