Speedrite Digital Fault Finder

Got this unit to work on my father's fences. I immediately realized the value this unit provides. Testing, locating and correcting even minor faults was very easy. Unfortunately, as I was bouncing around on the four-wheeler, I lost it in the tall grass and was unable to find it. That night I got back on line and ordered another one (I put an idiot string on the new one when it came in). While it's fairly expensive it's very easy to use and worth every cent. Just beware.. if your fencer/energizer is faulty you can get shocked through the unit. One of my father's fencers was faulty and I got nailed hard enough that I am fairly sure it would have killed any cattle that touched the fence. I probably wouldn't have noticed the faulty unit without this unit.

Once you get the hang of it, this is a very easy to use and read tool. Really helped me to improve the power all along the fencing at two vineyards. using the readings, i found how important it was to water the ground rod area fairly frequently to keep the fence power up and the animals out.

Works as advertised, but unfortunately the fault detection feature does not work on a chicken wire fence. I suspect this is because the current has multiple parallel paths making the current in any one strand of the fence too low for the tool to detect, however I have tested a workaround that will be better than nothing for my situation. I have a long electrified chicken wire fence to keep squirrels and other rodents out of my citrus trees. The fence poles are 8 to 10 feet apart. I will put a second pole about 4 inches away from an existing pole at every 10th pole. Then I will cut all but one strand of the chicken wire between the 4 inch spaced poles. The gap between the cut wires will be small enough to still keep the rodents out and the single strand of wire connecting the 100 foot sections of fence will carry all the current. I can use the tool at the single strand connections to determine the direction of the fault. It is not an ideal solution but will get me to the 100 foot section of fence with the problem. Putting double poles at each pole location would be ideal for finding faults, but is too costly and time consuming.

This is the first time I've ever felt compelled to write a product. We run a stocker cattle operation and secure our pastures with 6 strand high tensile fence. We energize 3 strands over multiple pastures. We had two loads of new feeder calves getting delivered and realized the fence wasn't charging properly. The fault finder quickly helped locate a short that was caused by a faulty post insulator near the far end of the pasture. The insulator was nearly 15 years old and looked fine to the naked eye. Without the fault finder, we would still be looking for the culprit. I highly recommend this handy tool.

Was hesitant to order this as we generally go with a grounded tester. We don't seem to have issues with this one. Even a three year old can operate :) Kinda handy to see which direction you are losing amps when the fence volts drop.

This fence tester has saved me a lot of time trying to find the "break" in my electric fence. It is easy to use and points to the direction of the problem! Although i hesitated for quite some time before spending $100+, I now wish I had done it sooner!

This device makes finding faults much faster and easier. This is by far the best way I have found so far to detect shorts in an electric fence. It's fun to use!

For 129.00 dollars, there are some expectations. First being on time delivery. That didn't happen. Second, if you provide a battery with your product, make sure it's not dead. This one was. Third, if you have to replace a battery, try and design your product to make it somewhat easy. This is not. Once I finally got a battery in it, the directions say press button to turn on. Ok, simple enough, but the unit does not stay on. Is the intent that you have to hold the power button the whole time you are using it? If so, you need to state that. So far, not impressed at all. My hope is to use it and see if it's really worth the hassle. It's frustrating this day and age how expensive everything is and at the very least you'd like to think what you spend money on is going to work out of the box.