Make your Orange fence last twice as long.
Three habits do most of the work: keep soil, mulch and grass clippings off the bottom of the sheets, wash the fence once a year with plain water, and re-plumb any post that starts to rock before winter rather than after. Do that and a Colorbond boundary here runs 25 to 30 years instead of 12 to 15, and a hardwood fence 20 to 25 instead of 10. Neglect has a price: a 20 metre run rusted through at the base is $1,800 to $2,600 to replace, and a rocking post turns a $180 to $350 straighten into a $380 to $650 rebuild.
The printable maintenance checklist
Grouped by how often it needs doing. Every item is marked DIY or PRO: the DIY ones need a hose, a soft broom, a rake and a spanner, and the PRO ones involve a footing, a pool barrier or a ladder. Ticks are saved in this browser, so you can come back to it next season.
After every storm or big westerly
Every season, about 20 minutes
Once a year, DIY
Once a year, get a pro
Every few years
Never do these: they void the warranty
What actually attacks a fence in Orange
This is a cold-climate, high-elevation town, and the enemies here are not the coastal ones. There is almost no salt in the air, so the classic seaside corrosion story does not apply. What does apply is water and movement. At roughly 860 metres the ground freezes and thaws repeatedly between May and September, and every cycle lifts a post footing a fraction and lets a little more water in. Underneath that, the reactive basalt clay off the Canobolas country swells when it is wet and shrinks when it dries, working the same footing from the side. That is why a fence footed to a coastal depth leans here within a decade, and why our quotes include deeper concreted footings rather than adding them later.
The second enemy is leaf litter, which is easy to underestimate in a town planted this heavily with deciduous trees. Wet leaves packed into the gap at the bottom of a Colorbond fence hold moisture against the steel for months, and that is where the rust line always starts. Third is irrigation: a sprinkler that clips the fence every evening does more damage than a wet winter, because the steel never dries. Fourth is soil, mulch and lawn clippings mounded against the sheets by a well-meaning gardener. On a rural run, add stock rubbing on strainers and kangaroos hitting wire at dusk, which is why rural fencing gets checked before joeys drop.
Want the yearly jobs done properly once?
Post re-plumbing, gate services and pool barrier checks, quoted per property before we start.
What neglect costs, in real numbers
Raking soil back off the bottom of a fence costs you twenty minutes a season. Not doing it costs $1,800 to $2,600 when a 20 metre stretch has to be replaced because the sheets have rusted through at ground level, and it brings that bill forward by ten years or more. A post that has started to rock is $180 to $350 to straighten and re-concrete while it is still standing straight, $380 to $650 once it snaps and takes a panel with it, and $4,000 to $5,200 once four or five posts in the same run have gone the same way at the same age.
On timber the maths is similar. Re-oiling a hardwood fence every 2 to 4 years costs $8 to $15 a metre in materials doing it yourself, or $18 to $35 a metre done properly. Skipping it does not ruin the fence overnight, but the palings check, cup and split, and replacing them later runs $30 to $60 a metre. Gate hardware is the sleeper: a $40 latch left to seize eventually drags the gate, which pulls the gate post, which is a $450 to $750 job.
What you should expect to get out of it
Maintained properly in this climate, expect 25 to 30 years from a 1.8m Colorbond boundary, 12 to 18 from treated pine paling with H4 posts, 20 to 25 from hardwood, 20 to 25 from an aluminium pool fence, and 20 to 30 from galvanised rural wire. Gate hardware is the exception at 5 to 8 years on any of them. Compare that against your fence age before you spend anything: if a run is already at the top of its range, maintenance will not save it, and the honest advice is to stop spending on it and price a replacement instead. The same goes for a fence that has never been footed deep enough: no amount of washing fixes a footing, and we will tell you that rather than sell you a service.
Get the annual fence jobs quoted for your property
Tell us the length and what is bothering you, and we come back within 1 business day with a written price for the jobs that are genuinely worth doing.
Fence maintenance questions
How long should a fence last in Orange NSW?
What actually kills fences in the Orange climate?
How often should a Colorbond fence be washed?
What voids a Colorbond fence warranty?
What does neglect actually cost?
Which jobs should I pay someone to do?
Related: timber fencing, gates and automation, what to do when a fence comes down and what to fix before you sell.