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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.
It'll be a lot of fun to see the guy's face when they steal his electric fence wire.
John
A 10 microfarad, 10kV capacitor makes all the difference.
But this isn't a booby trap.
The fences have to be properly signed, and are only allowed in industrial zoned areas.
Frankly, I think it's a bit overkill, but I totally understand. A local yard was robbed of commercial sized spools of copper wire, had to cost a ton. Even worse, thieves have been opening the access panel on street lights and using their cars to pull the wire out.
Rancho Cordova (where this passed) has long been seen as a higher crime area, not surprised they're going to these lengths at all.
-nbr
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Go re-watch Robocop, and keep an eye out for the "Magnavolt" car theft deterrent commercial. Best commercial on TV!
That would be this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRNVxHPJ0hM
but 7,000 volts sounds kinda' deadly
Depends on the effective output resistance of the circuit.
Someone had to do it.
'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.
Because he didn't know how to read the signs "copper thieves will be electrocuted; survivors will be electrocuted again"?
Privacy is terrorism.
I'm not a licensed electrician, but 7,000 volts sounds kinda' deadly.
Not really, as they say "current kills", not voltage. Static electric discharges frequently have a higher voltage than that. Lethality depends on a number of different factors. Of course, 7,000 volts of continuous DC current would most certainly be enough to kill most people, but electric fences usually use short pulses rather than continuous flow (at least, animal fences I've worked with, and been shocked by, do).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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.
No, no it's not. As the AC above you says, it is amperage that kills and not voltage. See Ohio state Physics for more info.
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.
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.
I am not a business. Businesses need accountants and legal help as part of their ordinary existence, and they're artificial entities to begin with.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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.
But you could be an electrician who stocks clippings and removed lines for recycling later. Are you stating that the Electrician should have to register every house they remove wire from... even if it is just a handful?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
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.
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/
> I'm not a licensed electrician...
This is clear.
> ...but 7,000 volts sounds kinda' deadly.
Electric fence chargers such as the one I use to keep my horses in put out short high-voltage pulses with an energy per pulse of about 6 Joules. The peak voltage is 5,000 to 10,000 volts. The shock is quite painful but not deadly. It leaves no mark and does no damage. I know this from direct experience.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Profit is not something people are entitled to; they can seek it, but there are various other societal interests in most things they might do, and those things have to be figured in. Usually through regulation.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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.
Why wouldn't an electrician have documentation about where they worked? They should include a clause in their contract for removal of excess pieces and parts or leave them with the customer.
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.
Actually to electrocute someone under normal conditions* you need both a sufficiently high open circuit voltage and a sufficiently high available current. If either of those is too low then you won't get sufficient current through the body to do significant damage.
That is why you can touch both terminals of your car battery at once, the short circuit current is huge (hundreds of amps) but the voltage is not sufficient to drive that current through the body under normal conditions.
In general things like electric fences are designed with a high open circuit voltage but a low short circuit current. This means that the current delivered to the body remains relatively constant (and hence can be designed to be high enough to be painful and yet low enough to be reasonablly safe) regardless of the skin resistance involved (which varies quite considerablly).
* That is external contact with the skin, if the skin is penatrated it takes far less voltage to push a deadly current.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
If businesses are people, then why aren't they put in jail when they break laws? Why aren't they required to pay income taxes, social security, serve in the army if there is a draft,.......
Businesses may EMPLOY people, and they can be OWNED by people. But they are certainly not people themselves.
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.
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Most of those laws only carry fines and other regulatory sentencing. However, it is easier to find a corporation guilty of a criminal act then it is a find a specific person within the corporation guilty of the act. This is because most laws actually require a men rea or state of mind in order to enter into the sentencing parts that include jail time.
Corporations are jailed all the time. They do not put a piece of paper in jail, the piece of paper doesn't act on it's own. It's the people within the construct of the piece of paper that actually acts and it is those who sit in jail. Sometimes the offense is to egregious that the corporations are disbanded as well as people being locked up.
You obviously have no clue what you're talking about. Owners, employees and executive officers are jailed all the time for criminal offences that are made by the business that they signed off on or perpetrated on behalf of the business. What did you think, you could kill someone and say "oh, I was working for a business" and get off? Don't be stupid. The people who own or are employed by the business are compelled to pay into social security and the business has to match their contribution, jackass, so it actually pays a shit load more than any one employed there, maybe remember that next time you read your paycheck stub, if you're even employed. The business has to pay a shit ton more tax than the individuals employed by the business and 100% of the people in the business can be drafted into service. And I'm sure if the government could work some way to get the building or filing cabinet owned by the business to be drafted into service they'd do that too. Bottom line, a business doesn't exist without the people who make up the business. It would be like if I said "the salvation army isn't people". So I think I hit all your ignorant points. Get a clue before you comment.
That is preposterous.
However, there IS a record for each item I purchase. It's called a "sales receipt", offered to me with each and every purchase. It itemizes everything, including any applicable sales taxes. It itemizes what I bought by brand name, size, cost, and whether I used any discount scheme to pay for it.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
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?