Parmak DF-SP-LI Electric Fencer, Natural

Electric fencing is a pain in the rump at best most of the time and low-impedance chargers can sometimes even be a larger pain in the rump because they are designed to charge a lot of fence over a long distance.The Parmak charger works great, especially for the price point; BUT it must be installed correctly according to your property conditions in order to not have problems or dis-satisfaction.Number one rule! -- Ground, Ground, GROUND! Fence chargers work directly in correlation to their ground. A good ground produces a strong and sustained charge each time it's called upon. A bad or weak ground produces next to nothing; genrally stronger closest to the charger and very weak or nothing at all the further away you get.In order to assure good grounding. This mainly depends upon your soil. Grounding rod(s) need to be in contact with moist soil (not dry but moist). Many people make a mistake and use a short grounding rod, a light piece of wire, and then blame the charger for not working. If your ground is dry, or gets dry during the course of the year; use a longer grounding rod so that it get's down into some moist soil. Also, as with all fence chargers they work best when you use not one, not two, but THREE grounding rods each tied to the next. I'm serious. If you want your charger to work, not be affected by weeds, etc that are touching the wire/rope, etc... then use three grounding rods. Place them approximately three feet apart, drive them deep into the ground, take one heavy wire that is long enough to reach from the terminal on your charger all the way to the last grounding rod that is nine feet away and clamp it down tight on each one. This is especially important for you folks that live in a very dry part of the country.I am telling you right now you will never be satisfied with this charger or any other if you do not ground it correctly.We have these chargers running at several different locations holding back cows, goats, dogs, and varmints and they work well all the time. We have situations where hay and other large grasses are bunched up and touching two or 3 wires and the fences still give a pop. The reason they work is because they are well grounded and the mechanical ground is far stronger than the weeds or hay that will cause grounding and shorts.Number 2 rule -- Face it South! This thing needs some sun. They pretty much come out of the box ready to go. But you do need to face it towards the sun. It needs full sunlight when it can get it. In order for the charge to last on those overcast days, weeks, etc... If you have trees, bushes, barn eaves, etc... that are partially blocking it from getting that sun when it can... Well then move it.Tip -- For those of you that live in challenged climates where the sun leaves for long periods of time. Go to Radio Shack or Amazon and pick you up a couple of more photocells and wire them in so that this will charge slightly faster. If this is beyond your abilities, there are other chargers on the market that use larger, deep cell, marine type batteries, that will carry a charge a lot longer without sunlight and you may need to consider those. The small charging cell and battery on this one will not let it go a long time without the sun if the animals are constantly abusing it.Seriously folks, solar charged fence electrifiers have their limitations. But as a whole they work very well when installed properly. This particular PArmak is one of the best I have used outside of Stafix. But as I said, the price point keeps me coming back.

I bought this in 2015 (over 4 years ago) to put an electric fence around our garden, and it has worked great (I'll tell you my setup below). This thing will give you a serious pop if you let it. I'll also tell you below how I toned down the power on it.We have every creature known to man that loves to eat our garden--squirrels (tree and ground varieties), rabbits, racoons (ok, no deer yet). This year, the fence was in bit of disarray, so we started the garden without the fence, and we have sadly been losing crops to those pests. I just fixed the fence today, and the battery was dead, but everything else works fine. Fun fact...this fence shocker works without a battery!...but only when the sun is actually shining on it (good for discouraging squirrels, but not racoons). I just ordered a new battery.As my son and I were working on the fence, he said that the Peter Rabbit movie portrays Mr. McGregor as an evil villain. He says he understands Mr. McGregror.OK, for some techy stuff now. Like I said, this thing will give you one massive pop. Since we have youngsters that occasion our yard, I decided to lessen the power of the system, and here's how to do it. Get yourself a length of old spark plug wire (you may be able to get it for free from your mechanic), maybe about 3 feet's worth. Strip the thick casing off both ends. Connect the spark plug wire from the shocker unit to the fence. Easy! The longer the spark plug wire, the less it will shock you! (spark plug wire is resistive). I made the shock intensity strong enough so that it will give me a memorable pop, but not so much that I'm (too) afraid to shock myself. However, when the corn is getting ripe, full power, Baby!You probably saw this elsewhere, but this shocker unit only gives shocks in pulses, about 1 per second. Two reasons for this: one, faster pulses use more power, and, two, so you can let go of the wire if you grab on to it. I do wish it would pulse at about twice per second, but I'm sure they have their reasons.Here's my fence setup: pressure treated 4x4s partially buried. Chicken wire draped over the 4x4s, and extend up to about 9 inches. At the top of the chicken wire is the first aluminum wire, which the chicken wire is attached to/hangs from. This aluminum wire and chicken wire are connected to the ground terminal of the shocker unit. About 2 to 3 inches above the ground wire is a second aluminum wire, and about 3 to 4 inches above that is a third aluminum wire; both of these are connected to the positive terminal; these two have insulators on the fence posts. Each wire is tensioned with one of those cool spring loaded wire tensioners. Get the rolling type of insulators, they make it so much easier to tension the wire.The idea is that small animals will be cautious coming to the fence, and investigating, will touch it with their nose or paws...WOW, I didn't know rabbits could fly! They don't bother coming back, even though they could easily jump over the stupid fence!The reason I made the fence only slightly taller than 1 foot is so that we can easily step over it without risking popping our legs...or anything else important. There is a gate that is hard to open in case we needed to get a wheel burrow in and out, but most of the time just stepping over the fence is just fine; and it's easy to turn off the unit when you're out there...just try remember to turn it back on when you're done. If we had deer, I would have put some extra wires up higher, and would have had to figure out another way for us gardeners to get in.There you go. Everything Mr. McGregor wished he knew.

I ordered two of these and neither worked so I just got a refund and bought a different brand. I really like the metal construction, the easy to read voltage strength meter and the visible on/off switch (as opposed to the plastic construction, no voltage strength meter, hidden on/off switch I saw on other chargers). The first one I ordered was left in the sun to charge for 6 days as instructed. The meter showed fully charged and it made the clicking noise when turned on but no voltage was coming from the terminals . I called Parmak customer service and after doing some additional tests while on the phone, the customer service rep told me something was broken inside, probably happening in shipping, I figured that could happen to any product and since I liked the design I ordered a replacement (which Amazon sent before they received the other one back). The replacement was placed in the sun for 6 days but the voltage strength meter showed the voltage drop quickly when the sun went behind a cloud. Figuring the battery wasn't fully charged, I moved the charger to an even sunnier location for 6 more days. However, the voltage meter showed the power continued to drop rapidly as soon as the sun was not shining on the solar panel. Also, even in bright sunlight there was no shock coming from the terminals. With the charger disconnected from the fence, I put a screw driver across the black and red terminals and the meter didn't move. I then touched the screwdriver to the red terminal and the metal case and could hear the shock and watch the meter move so figured it was a problem with the ground connection inside the box. Maybe it was just my bad luck to have two faulty chargers in a row but I felt I had wasted enough time so I got a refund and bought another brand locally.