We received a call in the last few days complaining that one of our premier products was rubbish and disintegrating. This product, the Ranger Hotstop Electric Fencing Rope, is one of our top sellers and we offer a warranty on it. The complaint was immediately investigated and found there were a few inconsistencies, the rope had no date twine (a coloured twine indicating the date of manufacture is woven into the rope) and the metal filaments were the wrong type of metal. It was not ours.

There is a Copycat product that looks identical but sells for a few pounds cheaper. The rope utilises stainless steel filaments so the conductivity is more akin to that of a cheap rope whilst it has very little of the UV stabilising compound incorporated into the polyplastic threads.

The copycat is on the left in the image below and it is clear that the colour has faded and the plastic has become brittle and begun to fray badly as you would expect non-protected plastic too look like after having been subjected to UV rays in the sunlight. This has only been in the sun for 18 months.

The correct product is on the right and shows no sign of degradation after being in the sun for 14 months.

As the rope looks like a quality rope the unscrupulous vendors are selling it at a higher price than it actually warrants but cheaper than the quality rope that it is impersonating.

After pointing this out to the customer she recalled having decided to purchase our rope but then saw the product on a competitors outlet that looked the same but cheaper so bought it. As a PR exercise it was decided to supply the customer with a reel and hopefully we will get good mileage out of the issue.