We often need to switch power off the electric fence to get over or through it somewhere and it’s quite a hassle to always walk to the electric fence energizer to do that. Luckily, wifi-controllable relays have gotten small and cheap enough so that we could easily install one in front of the energizer and can now control it with a smartphone app from anywhere in the world if we so wanted.

Wifi-controllable relays aren’t novel of course – we have used similar solutions in our greenhouse and duck house for over 10 years. What is new though, is that hardware and software has gotten really small, cheap and reliable. You can now buy a simple wifi relay in a nice form factor for around 5€ and control this with a free phone application called eWeLink (a really fitting name for our use case :))

At that price point it’s feasible to use these relays all over the place for many low value convenience functions, whereas previously it was kind of restricted to rather high value solutions.

P.S. In this specific case the small extra fusebox that holds the Sonoff module costs around 3 times as much as the module itself. It turned out that the energizer enclosure itself actually had enough free space inside so that I could have placed the wifi relay module inside the energizer, but we already had installed the fusebox…