You may have an intermittent wire break if your hidden dog fence wire break alarm starts beeping when the ground gets extremely dry, if your ground has become saturated with water, or if the ground froze. You could also notice this during periods of high winds as swaying tree’s roots gently tug at the wire.

Intermittent, frozen ground, dry ground and saturated ground can pull a wire apart at a damaged spot and trigger the wire break alarm. The aforementioned conditions cause small movements in the ground that the wire is buried in. You and I would not notice the movements, but we can see and feel the frozen, dried, cracked or saturated soil. To an otherwise perfect wire, a 1/64th of an inch movement in the ground can pull the wire apart just enough at a corroded spot to trigger the alarm. And sometimes, when the ground conditions change back to “Normal” for your area, the wire can reconnect and stop activating the wire break alarm.

This type of problem occurs when you have a bad splice, or where a wire was once nibbled on by a mole or by tree root growth after the wire was installed or damaged from an aeration machine, other kinds of minor or major excavation work where the wire is scraped, and old splices. Especially improperly spliced wire.

While this situation can develop in a few weeks or months after the wire disturbing work took place, it can take years sometimes for the “ticking time bomb” splice to fail.

It is also very common a few months after a Cable company for us to have to follow them thru the neighborhood because of the bad splices they made. Sometimes, this is years later.

Intermittent wire breaks and bad splices are difficult to find and fix. We can only work on them when the transmitter is beeping. Sometimes it requires multiple trips to find all of the bad places because they don’t all fail at the same time. Sometimes, your entire wire needs to be replaced. We cannot predict how long it will take to fix or that we can even find the problem in our first visit to your home.