Imagine you were called to my house....

cuz my horses won't drink out of their heated water tub! Now I know the first thing you're all gonna say but I think it's on my side and no I have no split neutral? We got two bigger horses separate in their own pen with a 15 gal Polly water tub heated by one of those floatin heaters! Next to them is a pony pen with a self heated 5 gal bucket literally about 4' away and the ponies are drinkin just fine? The floatin heater is plugged into an outlet nearby in a box that houses a fencer! Both the heaters and the fencer are all plugged into this GFCI outlet! I suspected voltage so I took a read with a Fluke from the water to the dirt and when every thing's plugged in I get a read of .1 intermittently timed perfectly to the fencer? Sometimes it stays .0 for a cycle or two of the fencer but pretty consistently it shows up when the fencer cycles?

When the fencer is unplugged the .1 volts disappears! I checked the fence for shorts and cleared what I thought were some from weeds and such? It still shows up? BTW my clyde walked over to the bucket with the heater out of it and drank? So I'm assumin they can feel this small amount of voltage?

So what do I do to eliminate this?? For now I'll leave the heater out of the tub durin these freakishly warm days with the fencer on and at night the reverse!

Gish! Where's all the "Theory Experts?"

Just kidding! I have come to the conclusion because of poor soil conditions and the fact I only placed 2 ground rods for the fencer (a fencer BTW is for energizing a wire fence to control livestock!) that this is why the fencer was causing the voltage to appear in the watering bucket? I was hoping someone was going to ask me how the grounding for the fencer was to see if i'm on track? I'll have to drive another rod or two and maybe borrow a Biddle tester to improve my grounds for the fencer? What I'm wondering though is if I should feed the water heater from a different outlet further away??

My Dad used to pour some water around the grd rod to improve the fencer's preformance. So I have used that trick on screw grds when someone is starting to feel some induction on the wire.

Last year during a really hard freeze we had the fencer wasn't working? I poured salt over the rods and it helped. Killed the grass though!