When planning and designing your fence it sometimes gets overlooked that you will need to maintain your fence over time. Why? Because no matter how well your fence has been built things happen over time such as:
- The soil moves or erodes
- animal pressure on fence might
- branches falling
- people stepping on wires
And the list goes on! Out of this reason it’s very important that fence maintenance is built into your fence. For starters we use inline wire strainers (ratchet strainers) for all wires now because this allows you as the owner to easily restrain any slack wire by using a shifter when required.
As you are most likely aware the functionality of a fence is to a large part determined by it’s end assemblies (corner posts and stays) and this is where the traditional stay such as a timber angle stay or metal stay is falls down. This setup is great when the new fence is installed and will last a few years however it’s not adjustable when things change and when you look around paddocks you’ll see a lot of strainer posts leaning, meaning that this fence is now nearing it’s time when it will no longer be functional often well before this should happen.
Here is were some innovations in fencing really make a difference, and yes they might cost a little extra at time of install but these seriously can extend the life of your fence because they allow you to adjust your end assemblies when needed. Have a look at the pic below and you’ll see that the stay sits on a plate making it adjustable because you can move the connector between stay and strainer posts and the tension cable between post and stay plate.
