Our customers and fencing contractors tell us that this is leading to a reduction in pole and post lifespan. This is bad enough for a domestic fence post but much worse when the pole is being used to support high-value commercial vines, fruit trees and plants or stock fencing to prevent livestock straying.
Take the example of 1000 poles used in the vineyard. With failures occurring on a regular basis throughout the life of the pole population, it is not unusual to see annual replacement rates typically running at 6 to 10%.
And the cost of this? Around £1800-£2,400 per year per 1000 posts installed, including post cost, labour, fuel overheads etc. Or £18,000 - 24,000 every 10 years. Never mind the damage that might occur to valuable vines trees or plants in the meantime.
So looking at this in context, the initial cost of the post at a few pounds each is virtually insignificant in relation to the lifetime cost of installing and replacing the poles or posts as they fail.
The simple solution to this problem is to use a rot protection system such as Postsaver rot protectors. They are a dual-layer flexible and elastic barrier that maintains the rot-preventing seal even when the wood moves, shrinks or cracks with a seal being maintained over even the largest of cracks. They can be used with all preservative types, including creosote and copper-based preservatives.
Rot-protected posts can be installed in any of the normal ways including being driven in, the tough dual-layer construction being damage resistant in the stoniest of ground conditions a claim backed up by the hundreds of thousands of sleeved posts installed in this way without problems.
The Postsaver system has been subject to rigorous independent field testing with excellent results, the field test data showing failure and heavy decay in the standard preservative-treated control samples whilst the Postsaver protected samples are almost totally decay-free.
These results are backed up by the millions of Postsaver protected posts in service with virtually zero failures.
