Patriot basic cut-out switch

Details

On any fence longer than a couple of paddocks, the day comes when you need one leg dead and the rest of it live. A cut-out switch gives you that. It mounts on a wood post or a metal pipe at the head of a branch line, and a flick of the lever drops power to everything downstream while the main line keeps working. That matters most when you are fault-finding. Instead of walking the whole system looking for the short, you open one switch at a time and watch the voltmeter come back up. The bad leg announces itself in minutes instead of an afternoon. It is also the honest way to work on a wire in February without leaving the whole herd standing behind a dead fence. The fittings are stainless steel, so the contact stays clean and conductive through freeze-thaw cycles and the wet runoff of a spring breakup that chews through plated hardware. Put one in at every branch, at the yard end of a long run, and anywhere you regularly isolate a section to work on it.