Slashdot Mirror
High-Voltage Fences For Zapping Would-Be Copper Thieves
coondoggie writes "It may be a gimmick or the ultimate answer, but a California city this week okay-ed a draft ordinance that would let businesses install 7,000-volt electric fences to protect sites from rampant copper thieves. As reported by the Sacramento CBS station, the reaction from one business owner to the ordinance says it all: 'It'll be a little fun to watch one of these guys get electrocuted holding my fence trying to rob me.'"
Coming soon: "Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence" championship edition.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Start making the recyclers who pay cash for copper keep records and start prosecuting them for receiving stolen goods.
If businesses are allowed to do this, PLEASE tell me that they will next allow vehicle owners to similarly trap their cars/trucks from being broken into by theives. I can't think of a good way to 'trap' a window, but the metal door handle? Sure, why not? And I'm sure there's dozens of potential ways to trap a vehicle to deter thieves.
Some of the ones shown on the old 'stickdeath' site come to mind.
It'll be a lot of fun to see the guy's face when they steal his electric fence wire.
John
Booby trapping is technically illegal in California.
remember that trial where a business owner was charged in killing a teenager allegedly attempting to loot his store? The store owner rigged a shotgun to go off if hte back door was opened from the outside. It killed the kid, and the owner went to jail. Of course, all of this happened in LA... which is more screwed up than Sacramento.
A 10 microfarad, 10kV capacitor makes all the difference.
old stuff... in robocop 2 they had it way sooner :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U4ZYOBzEEs
to watch the action?
A former police officer friend of mine once sent me a pic of two electrocuted copper thieves, pretty nasty way to go. These two guys were trying to steal LIVE electric lines straight off of the pole, a bad career move on their part. A minor zap to deter bone-headed thieves would save lives. I'm not a licensed electrician, but 7,000 volts sounds kinda' deadly.
If someone gets injured or dies from this system, couldn't the owner be charged with battery, manslaughter or worse? Even if the government sanctioned the device, it might be criminal. And of course there's always the non-criminal, civil suit liability to worry about.
In South Africa (I think), they had an even more novel solution.
They simple altered the reclose time on their power lines so the copper thieves could trip them.... assume the line's been de-energised.... and hook it up to the truck to drag it down.
When it finally reclosed it took out the whole lot with kilovolts of canned Thor and taught them a valuable lesson.
Probably be litigated into the ground in the US, however.
here in nothing-happens land, we had a case a couple years ago where a copper thief decided he was going to clean out a power substation.
as in 110,000 volts on that line.
there was enough to drag into court recently to send to jail for it. but as long as ignorant meth-heads can bring in saw-cut cable and get cash, they'll continue to strip fire stations and chain up fiber-optic ducts and try to roll full spools into the trunks of compact cars.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
'It'll be a little fun to watch one of these guys get electrocuted holding my fence trying to rob me.'"
Until the the thief turns around and tries to sue you and most likely wins.
Typical domestic animal control fences carry a non-lethal charge of from 2,000 volts to 10,000 volts. It's not the voltage that kills you, it's the current.
http://www.uwex.edu/ces/crops/uwforage/energizer.pdf
I hope the fences aren't made out of copper wire...
Hot Gloves will work just fine.
Its like people that gripe about immigrant workers...... come down on the people hiring them, or in this case buying "hot" copper.
The costs to business that illeagaly buy/fence copper? Maybe it might be an extra cost to legitimate copper recyclers but the actual ones forcing government to act is those copper recyclers that buy such stolen copper. Keeping records is no more than what is expected from pawn shops. As an additional part of the sugested record keeping, I would also demand a fingerprint of any seller. That way we could also get evidence of the thief as well as his fence.
Problem solved.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Any engineering whiz out there that can figure out a way to use the electricity on the fence to recharge your car (though the drain may be noticed), or perhaps through induction, recharge your phone or tablet?
What's so special about copper? Why can't I put an electric fence around my box of donuts that everyone keeps putting their grubby hands into and stealing a donut?
OK, so the example is silly but the point is still there. If somebody can put an electric fence around copper why can't everyone who has something they want to prevent theft of using electric fences?
Where I live that is one of many regulations related metal recycling. It hasn't worked. There is no way to identify a particular piece of pipe, wiring etc. and say it came from some specific location. Even where you COULD match it up, that would require forensic inspection of every piece of metal trash, then comparing each to all thefts. We're talking about vast amounts of scrap, trash, every day, not the occasional mysterious body evey few years, so the forensics to match them aren't anywhere near feasible.
As with cattle fences this would be a pulsed current, probably one or two pulses per second. They charge a capacitor to the peak voltage then dump it into a step-up transformer, reminiscent of old capacitor-discharge ignition systems for cars.
This enables the number of Joules and the shape and duration of the pulse to be controlled, reducing the chance of fatalities, and so avoiding legal problems.
As to gloves, 5KV to 7KV would be enough to break down many cheaper types of insulating gloves, so thieves may still be in for a surprise.
A neighbor girl had fun teaching my dogs to jump my fence. She was climbing back and forth into my yard all the time and goading the dogs to follow her. They of course learned. So I went to the local farm implement store and was looking at invisible fences... they were expensive... then I saw the regular farm electric fence transformer was only $15! SOLD! A roll of aluminum wire was $5 for 1/4 mile and the insulators was another $2. So for $22 and about 2hrs work I had an electric fence.
Well my neighbors were "outraged" The little girl that had been jumping the fence was now in "mortal danger" according to her mom. I told her "well maybe you should keep her off my fence then" The fact of the matter is, I got zapped by far worse fences than what I put up when I was a kid... and while it smarts, it doesn't do any real damage to you. Apparently there's a city ordinance against electric fences in town, they pointed this out to me... I pointed out that I really didn't care and I was already breaking at least a dozen others. They called the cops... cops never came. Apparently had more important things to do.
Then, about 8 months later, the best thing ever happened (well for me anyway.) The neighbors got their house broken into. I guess it wasn't great for them. But the cops showed up, investigated, and told them there were tracks in the mud leading up to MY fence... then for some odd reason the moved over to their house, jumped the fence and kicked in the back door. The husband told me about this... wanted his own electric fence now. He said "When you stop laughing can you go with me to the store?"
Long story short... electric fences rock. 2 of my neighbors have them to.
For every grocery item you buy, fill out a form with it's UPC code, expiration date, etc. Make a copy of your ID for each. Then do a forensic examination on each piece of trash so that you can distinguish between one milk carton and another. Do that for a week, then tell us if it's acceptable to you to spend your days doing that.
I really hate when people say 'electrocute' when they mean 'shock'. Big difference.
You don't walk off being electrocuted, it's the end of the line.
Unless he's actually planning on having a lethal fence, which is fucked, not to mention a massive liability.
BTW, if you ever need to determine if your electric fence is switched on or not, without putting your tongue across it, a portable AM radio tuned between stations and held close to the wires will enable the HV pulses to be heard.
Probably falls under reckless endangerment but if they could only leave a pile of copper coils out in the open, behind the fence of course, and connect it to a high power line...
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
How about instead of spending billions on replacing stolen goods and electric fences and insurance we instead spend millions giving away free crack, heroin and other addictive drugs? You get a card and you can go to a drug store and get free heroin. We'd save a LOT of dollars.
I'm not an expert, but is the cost of ...
1) An electrician
2) The fence wire and pole installation
3) The inverter, components, and monthly power
4) The signage I'm sure would be required by law
5) The periodic maintenance and upkeep of insulator coils
6) The outer barrier-fence that this almost certainly will need as a matter of safety and/or law (and simple maintenance--don't want windblown debris shorting things)
Actually cheaper than a guard armed with a pistol? I mean, even in California at a certain point you gain the right to say "Stop, or I'll shoot" and actually follow through...
I'm assume it'd be high voltage, low amperage fence... a horse or cattle fence doesn't take much, but in order to deter a person you actually need more than painful -- you need a "probably dangerous" quantity.
I'm not sure what the costs of a military or police style electric fence actually are monthly... But I'm seriously wondering how it compares with human labor...
I once touched an electric fence with a three foot stick. I got quite a jolt. It's current, amps, that are dangerous, but it's volts that jump through insulation, and these things have a lot of volts. If you're unsure whether gloves, say thick leather work gloves, will help, consider this - an electric fence is designed to drop a 2,000 bull. A bull covered in non-conductive hair, and under that, covered in leather. Hmm, I'm giving advice for THIEVES. Come to think of it, everything I just said is a lie. All you have to do is use your T shirt to cover the wire, so your hands don't touch it directly. It'll work, I promise.
The electric utility here uses a proprietary type of wire that no one else has access to (AFAIK it’s not “special” beyond being braided in a particular pattern) so recycling companies can identify cable that’s been pulled from streetlights and such.
How many people die from touching electric fences in farms?
Better to unleash the laser sharks
3V across the heart can kill you. 750 volts behind 2 milliamps is a prank sold in toy stores. (Shock pen.) 100,000 volts behind 0.1ma you wouldn't even notice. Volts aren't dangerous, amps are.
Watch as a burgeoning black market for 7000V transformers and fence wiring blossoms.....
(in parallel to that of copper stuff, of course)
I think you don't actual have a clue and are making that up.
We are talking about huge rolls of unused wire, industrial valves that cost 30k+, statues. Sometimes 100's of yards of copper.
So when some cones tolling it with a giant spool of wire in there truck, that person gets photographed. If someone reports large bundles of wire stolen, then police can ask that person questions .
Forensics. You need to watch less CSI.
The police report a large copper valve has been stole and provide description. The get a thumb print and picture. Possible an address(which may be a lie).
Then they do investigation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
7,000 volts is not a high voltage fence. Our farm fences are 10,000 volts. It's not the voltage that will kill you though, it is the amperage that does you in. For this reason the fences are high voltage and low amperage. It hurts. However, if you're determined you can grab ahold of the fence and hang on right through the shocks. I've done it many times when needed.
See this article:
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/2007/07/23/calibrating-pain-fence-testing/
gloves, shoes, and maybe rain gear make the fence pointless? Oh, well I suppose the contractor installing the fence benefits so I guess it's OK.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Don't they do that everywhere?
Well for everything but Al cans, those are excluded, guess if someone wants to steal empty cans they aren't stopped from doing so.
That said, there is still plenty of theft of metals. So I guess it doesn't do much good.
To deter copper thieves, why not go straight for the payload. Put a massive, high current coil along the fence line, and induce a current in the stolen copper, either making it too hot to handle, or melting it in place. Safe for the neighborhood kids (provided they keep their bikes away).
Can we stop all this amps and voltage nonsense? They are proportional to each other. Higher voltage gives higher current. The only way high voltage is safe is if the power source can't support the large current draw. Then you don't get the current because the battery dies. If you don't believe me, feel free to go grab some 110 kV power lines.
I remember numerous stories from the 90's where businesses would booby trap their business to stop thieves and I thought in every case this was illegal. One business owner I remember released a few poisonous snakes in his business and posted signs outside saying to stay out because poisonous snakes were on patrol. Eventually the thieves returned to the scene of their previous crime, broke-in, and got bit. Following American customs, they sued the business owner and won.
Not sure what the defense argument was but I'd think electrified copper would result in the same thing and the criminals would sue.
The blame for this problem rests almost totally at the feet of Ben Bernanke. His policies have driven commodity speculation and helped keep prices high. It's one of those "unintended consequences".
If you want to stop copper theft, stop savings theft. The policy makers need to ask questions like, "Is it better in the long run to feed these people in a recession, or drive them to copper theft in a stagflation?".
Treating drug addiction as a health problem rather than a crime problem will also help. If meth were available for $0.10/pill at the drugstore, I would not run out and become an meth fiend anymore than I would start huffing gasoline. Yes, people huff gasoline, they huff the propellant from Cheeze Whiz. We don't ban those things because the inability to drive or squirt cheese is deemed worse than the potential for people to huff shit. We treat huffing in the ER, and with social workers. We could treat meth like that too, and there would be less copper theft.
Yeah, the housing market would collapse. You know what? Good! Stop foreclosures? Hell no. If you want to liberate people, you should be holding up signs that say START foreclosure. Yeah, people would hurt for a month or two getting kicked out of the big house with no equity and a $2000/mo mortgage. You know what? They'd move into an apartment with an $800/mo rent, and they might be able to save up for down payment on a house with a $1000/mo mortgage once the foreclosure was far enough behind them. That sounds more like freedom to me than... Oh, I digress...
Anyway, the problem of copper theft isn't technical. It's social and economic. Quit applying technical fixes to social problems. Please. Pretty-please?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Having worked in the recycling industry for years, solving the "sales" side of this is easy.
A posted and implemented policy of paying by check if the payout is greater than $20 makes most of these problems go away.
This works because large volumes comes in trucks and legitimate businesses generally prefer to receive a check (prevents employee skimming).
After that, invest in a few video cameras, particularly one trained at the parking lot exit (to pick up rear license plates). Attach these to a motion-detecting video recorder and make sure you know how to burn DVDs. The few times we have had to involve law enforcement, they were pretty happy with a plate number and footage including a face and "the goods".
So far, we have never had the check cashed, but if we did, the cops would then have a tie to the criminal's financial institution and we would join their case with a counter-suit to get our money back.
Keep in mind that we really do not want to make an illegal buck, but at the same time, we also want to earn the legal bucks as efficiently as possible.
Love all the posts about using gloves etc., but the physicist in me didn't even bother with thinking about that.
Get iron rod, shove in ground on side nearest the supply box (or one either side of you to make sure), join to fence using other iron rods or similar (literally a "now throw it on from here" connection with no risk). Then cut fence. Isn't that going to be more effective, shorting the fence to ground, than leaving it live in your hands? If you're really determined, find the source of the voltage and short close to that.
Or failing that, just do what the local cable thieves do with train track and signalling copper when they steal it (if a crowbar across it isn't enough to make it safe by fusing / grounding the local supply). Attach large (non-conductive) hook from a safe distance (a plank of wood could probably always be sought that would long enough), drive off and take the fence with you. Hell, melt it down while you're at it.
Stopping a thief who is ALREADY going to the lengths of breaking into a place and stealing cable (sometimes even live cable, and not always unsuccessfully) is going to need more than a little fence-zapper, which are quite common in ordinary households in some countries to keep even small livestock contained. Especially if the pay-off is more than a day's wages in copper.
People in my country steal live railway tracks and miles of signalling cable in less than a minute and get away with it. An electric fence (which would be illegal in my country anyway) isn't going to hinder them *that* much.
Almost all security measures rely on the fact that it attracts suspicion to circumvent them and hinders people for a brief moment to prevent casual theft. In reality, short of a guy with a gun you're not going to stop someone stealing something that's worth money. And even then, if it's worth enough, they'll just bring their own guns or pay him off.
It's quite common in some parts of the world. Have a look at the tops of the walls in this Google Street View - A random street in Johannesburg.
42 hidden comments
"Amps and volts are proportional" ... "you don't get the amps". See how you realized they sometimes are NOT proportional? Ohm's law is for continous DC. Pulses are different. I'm sure you intuitively understand that the 12,000 volt spark you get when touching a metal object after walking on carpet is not a hundred times as powerful as sticking your finger in a light socket.
Amps is basically the flow rate of electrons. Dividing pressure (voltage) by resistance will give you the flow rate, but there's no flow here. It's a pulse, more like getting hit with a fast moving drop of water, not a stream going through you.
There was an area in Russia where thieves cut down a high-tension wire. They shot a steel cable over the line, shorting it out and causing the breakers to pop. They then cut out a HUGE section before it could reset. They got nearly 2 miles of cable.
The local power company replaced the cables. They finish working at the other end, and give the okay to turn on the power. Two miles downrange, see a huge flash, then they hear *BOOM!* The power goes offline again, and the repair team goes back to where the first cut was made.
They find a grass fire. After putting it out, they find that the cable had been cut again, and was in the process of being coiled up by the thief.
The thief had been standing in the middle of the coil when the power was turned on.
All they found was a pair of boots, with feet inside them. Everything else had been vaporized.
[End Of Line]
Aside from the definition Google shows in preview, the first four results in YOUR link all say electrocute = kill. Only the one displayed in full indicates it's ever used to mean injure. So four dictionaries say it means lethal, one doesn't. It's okay to be wrong, that's how we learn.
A engineer mate of mine was working in Ghana and had a 2km fibre line installed to his house from the nearby gold plant so that he could get reliable remote access.....well he thought it was going to be reliable.
Stupid local thieves trying to find copper dug down to the fibre line, cut it, and and then realised it wasn't copper. Now in a normal country, you might have a chance of pulling a bit of slack and resplicing, but not in Ghana. The thieves then continued to move down the line another ten metres or so and tried again. And again. Multiple cuts only to find that the same damn cable was still not copper. Farking Genius!
The more electric fences the better I think.
http://www.kens5.com/news/Man-loses-arms-and-legs-in-copper-theft-83398667.html
Poland. In response to rampant copper plundering they went to fiber. Treat it as a call to upgrade, not to bolster your defenses.
In South Africa they'll steal the fence. No kidding. You kan make it 7000V or 700000V. They'll make a plan.
TFA needs an editor even more than Slashdot does.
I can hold the wire on my 5,000 volt electric fence almost comfortably. It delivers a tiny amount of current about once a second.
Sure it's startling, but it's not dangerous. It startles animals so they take off running.
Unless the article tells how many amps the fence delivers it missed the main specification.
A lot of the cable theft in the UK is from the rail network, because it's almost all electrified using overhead power cables. Oddly this comes with its own inbuilt (mostly) 25 kV AC protection. It doesn't stop them. They also target the signal cables, which I think use high voltage as well.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
it is a right of passage for manly youth of the rural persuasion to test the fencers... once. I had the opportunity to check one back a quarter mile from Grandpa's, down on the old farm boundary of what was his land and that of Dad's friends.
yep, it's working.
hurts, but shouldn't put anybody on the ground.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
they have a nice little small town radio station in Detroit Lakes, MN with a nice little tower down near a lake, surrounded by grazing land. seems the cows kept breaking through the antenna feedline and putting them off the air.
so they've got a wowzer electric fence protecting the feedline.
probably has as much power as their dollar-a-holler station, for whenever you dial them in, you get the SNAP SNAP SNAP of their electric fence imposed on the broadcast signal.
in Devils Lake, ND, they have a similar situation. except they buried their feedline in a duct. no fencer needed.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Or you could you know try and solve the whole rampent poverty situation so people wouldn't be inclined to steal copper wire to try and make a living.
auto-targeting mini-guns would also work, but are only slightly less ridiclous.
i used to have an electric fence behind my house as a kid, so as you can imagine i have had plenty of experience with them (they werent particularly high voltage but it was enough to let you know if you touched one). i touched one with a magnet a few times and it was very strange.. it made my elbow jump (its the only way i can describe it), but without the magnet it was just a shock on the hand. anyone know why this is?
As you apparently have never heard that it is possible to limit a current, you should better stfu.