Electric fence technology has made notable advances in recent years. These technological advances have allowed livestock producers to increase their grazing operations’ management potential by attributing flexibility to the rotation of grazing resources. The major component of an electric fence is the charger or energizer; these two terms are used interchangeably throughout this article.

AC, or 110V, fence chargers are simply powered directly by a connection to your electrical grid. Maybe you put your charger on your barn wall and plug it in there. Maybe you run an extention cable out to an energizer housing closer to your fence line. However you do it, your AC chargers have to plug in to the wall at some point making them very convenient and easy to use in most cases, but downright impossible when you have to power a fence line in some remote location.

DC, or battery-run fence chargers are even simpler to use than AC chargers. Instead of running a line directly to your wall outlet, a battery fence charger draws its power from an internal (or external depending on the model) power source. Typically, most Gallagher fence chargers are optimized to run on a 12V deep cycle battery (a car battery). This makes battery chargers very easy to use in remote locations, but also requires that the batteries be recharged every now and again to keep the fence up and running. You can minimize electric fence down time by keeping multiple 12V batteries and swapping them out on the charger when time comes for a recharge.

Solar fence chargers are pretty self-explanatory. Similar to DC chargers, a solar charger draws its energy from a connected power source (a battery).The difference is that a connected solar panel can then recharge the connected battery keeping it functional non-stop without the need for swapping batteries. This really makes solar solutions ideal for any temporary or rotational fencing implementation.

Keep in mind that many chargers (even many Gallagher chargers) can be used interchangeably with different power sources. Similarly, most of the battery chargers can be converted to AC power with a simple adaptor available for fairly cheap.

Once you know what type of charger you need you can start to drill down to what size and power of charger you'll need.As you look through our fence chargers online, you'll notice we make comparisons in power in Joules, Miles, and Acres. It is important that the numbers that are provided are under assumed "ideal" conditions (enough moisture in the ground, set up correctly, no weeds along the fence line, well insulated, and so on).