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If you have a digital fence tester meter,go to the rods you used for ground rods and see how much voltage you have at those rods. If it's above .3(300 volts) you need to add real ground rods until you bring that voltage down to .3 or lower at the ground rod. I've found over the years that there needs to be one ground rod per 1000 volts. And yes most of the year you can get by with less but for dry conditions that works best. Ground rods need to be placed no less than 10 ft. apart and stay away from building ground rods for ele. service/ and utility pole grounds too. Ground rods should be 8 ft. and designed for that purpose only. Be it copper or galv. One more thing I've found over the years with HT fence. Ground rods wear out on these higher voltage fence chargers. They need to be replaced about every 6-7 years. The rod becomes pitted and doesn't give a good earth ground after some years on it. Last fence charger I bought was a range master. Got it all hooked up on 4 ground rods. Was getting about 4,000 volts. Started adding rods and when I put the 7th rod in the voltage came up to 8,000. Added 4 more rods and got just over 12,000 volts out of it. Takes a lot of green grass to pull it down now. Once I found how important ground rods were, I started drilling and tapping right in the top of the rod. Then use a crimp on lug on #6 wire. I bolt the lugs down to the rods and seal the connections with a medium voltage spray on coating. That's solved a lot of low fence voltage problems for me. To keep cows in I like 6,000V on my smaller fence chargers and 10-12,000V on the larger ones. Larger chargers have more fence load on them. My cows haven't been outside the fence in 9 years now.
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