Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I noticed there were a ton of negative reviews on Zareba products but I didn't have the luxury of time so I took a chance. I'm glad I did. At first I thought I had screwed up because I couldn't get consistent performance out of the fence. Sometimes you could touch it for a moment and nothing would happen. Sometimes you'd get a small shock, sometimes you'd get blasted. I figured something was wrong with the unit. Actually, I have this one and the 2 mile Solar unit and both were doing the same thing. So I thought, "Well, that's what you get for rushing into it without doing the proper research." But I'm a math/science guy and I thought, "I can't honestly say I know for a fact that these units are defective without testing them. So I bought a $29 fence tester. Thank God I did! Turns out these units send a pulse of electricity every one or two seconds. I'm not sure of the timing. But I had figured it would be an open circuit that would blast you the moment you touched it. Not true. You can often times touch the fence for a moment or two and nothing will happen if you're in between pulses. But if you touch it at the right time you'll be blasted. So the tester helped me understand how these units work. The second thing it helped me do was diagnose a bad ground. The tester will tell you how many volts you're getting with each shock. You test it at the unit itself and then test to fence to see how much you are losing. With a clean fence and a pretty good ground I was getting about 9,000 volts out of both units at the fence. I was getting 12,000 volts testing the unit itself. Those were the best numbers I could get. But trust me....9,000 volts is a solid shock. Take your shoes off and stand barefoot on the ground and touch that fence. You'll jump two feet in the air. So if you're working with electric fences for the first time, make sure of two things: 1) Get a tester that's built specifically for electric fences. Not only will you use it to diagnose a bad ground during installation, but you can test the fence regularly to see if it's getting grounded out by weeds. You'll see the voltage start to drop. When it gets below 8,000 I clear the fence again and it goes back up around 9,000. 2) You need an awesome ground. I don't even know you and I can't see your setup but I can tell you right now the problem is your ground. It's really about the only problem you can have with such a simple setup like this. If the unit works then all you need is a good ground and you're ready to go. Make sure you have a minimum of two (preferably three) long ground rods installed as per the instructions - about 10 feet apart. There are a lot of bad reviews on these fencing units and I know from experience that most of the time the unit is fine. The installation wasn't done properly and the fence wasn't properly tested.