Hey

I posted on here a few months ago when I had just taken over a new studio in a barn and found out once I had signed the lease that the power supply for the studio also supplied a mains powered electric fence.

Anyway after 4 weeks of pulling down walls and rebuilding we are finally up and running and have been able to check out the clicking that the fence supposedly caused ourselves.

I carried out a few tests last night and when the fence is turned on you can hear a very very faint clicking through the desk and monitors. As soon as you move over to a guitar amp, plug a jack cable in and hit the gain dial then the clicking is so so loud its unbelievable

So I did the same test again with the fence turned off and the clicking completely stopped so it has to be the electric fence.

The mains powered electric fence the farmer is using is a Rutland ESM 3300 Electric Fence Energiser, its full details are at

Rutland 3300 Electric Fence Energiser Specs

The farmer has been quite cool about things and said for the moment we can turn the fence off when we need to record guitars but really we need to find a practical and cheap solution has anyone got any ideas???

The farmer is willing to look into other options if they are availible.

There is another electric fence on the farm and this is battery operated so I'm thinking buying him a battery operated fence maybe an option, but ideally he wants to keep his mains fence.

Our electrician mentioned something about clean filter sockets that are used for high end PCs but didnt know if this would filter out the noise or not??


any ideas or experiences would be great


thanks
ow

What about checking into some of the higher end Furman or other power conditioners/voltage regulators? Some of them are supposed to be very good at filtering out line noise and would also protect from spikes etc

You may be picking up the electric field through the coils of the guitar.

Does it have humbuckers?



-tINY

yeah th guitar has humbuckers
the noise starts as soon as you plug a jack lead into the amo before you even plug it into the guitar


thanks
ow

It would be worth doing a thorough inspection of the installation of the fence. I have found that the grounding posts can be positioned in places which allow more or less interference.

I can see why the farmer prefers a mains-powered fence: battery or solar power would be a constant irritation, in terms of worrying that it would run out of juice. Of course, electric power can go out too, and you could offer to watch over the battery level for the guy. Those fence boxes can be pretty expensive, and I would think the battery powered ones would be twice as much.

Right now I have an electric fence on the same circuit as my studio, and I have yet to notice any problems, but haven't needed to investigate much yet, as the fence is rarely on, also this fence is very short.

There could be interference with the pickups, I hadn't thought of that, but it definitely happens even with nothing plugged in to the amp.

Running a studio on the same circuit as an electric fence sounds like a big no-no from the get-go. I have a gut feeling any actual solution for this is not going to be as cheap as a Furman.

You might look into giving the power company a call and seeing how much it would be to get the barn set up on its own separate meter and breaker box (which you would pay for - if, as I assume, you're sub-leasing the barn on the farmer's property from the farmer, you might be able to interest him by telling him that then you could meter and pay for the power you're using in the studio yourself). Might be the cheaper and almost certainly more effective solution, and hopefully actually fix the root cause of the problem rather than trying to put a band-aid on an already FUBARed-from-the-word-go electrical situation.

Another possibility: Run EVERYTHING from a big-ass "always online" UPS (the kind that constantly charges a big backup battery, and then converts the battery power back to "new" AC to run the outlets for your gear - not the typical computer-store kind that runs off incoming AC then switches the outlets over to 'battery backup' only if the incoming AC cuts out).

Hi there, did you end up coming up with a solution to this issue? I'm having a similar problem but my next door neighbour has the electric fence.

This was never an issue we solved and we just turned the fence off when recording guitars.

From memory I think we ended up buying the farmer a reachable battery. This was over 15 years ago now so a bit hazy on the details as I moved out of that studio a long time ago.

https://youtu.be/azxx9sG4Gjw?si=sSOM1-evLuOIM_Qo

The farmer across the road from my grandmother's house had an electric fence for his cows. Me and my friends would take turns seeing who could hold the shortest piece of grass on the fence. "Cow Fence Chicken" we called it. (chicken being the game of chicken, not the animal chicken)

I got the full force of the fence once, not while playing the game, but because I thought it was off . One thing I can tell you is always test with the back of your hand, because the shock will make your fist close involuntarily and now you are really gripping the damn thing.