Patriot wood post porcelain insulator (with nail) (25 per box)

Details

Plastic insulators have a working life. Sun, cold and the odd grass fire will take them down eventually, and on a permanent boundary fence built to outlast the person who put it in, that is a maintenance job nobody wants to schedule. Porcelain does not care. Patriot lists this one as fire resistant and effective as a line insulator, for use with steel or aluminium wire on wood posts, under product code 880 0003-219. Nails are included and there are twenty-five in the box, SKU 814213. The trade-off is that porcelain is brittle. It will not soften in the sun or go chalky after a decade, but it will crack if you drive the nail crooked or catch the body with the hammer. Set the nail carefully, keep the last blow controlled, and check the insulator before you run wire, because a cracked porcelain insulator can still hold the wire and still leak to ground. Use it for straight line runs. Corners and terminations need a strain fitting, and this one is not built to take the pull of a direction change.