Safety and Palisade Fencing

Safety and palisade fencing is the steel perimeter that goes around ground the public is not meant to walk onto. Palisade is the fence made of vertical steel pales bolted to horizontal rails, usually seen around substations, water and wastewater plants, transport corridors, contractor yards, waste and recycling sites, distribution centres and school and factory boundaries. Safety fencing is the wider category it belongs to: any barrier whose job is keeping people away from machinery, drops, traffic or stored plant rather than simply marking a line. The buyers are asset owners, facilities managers, utilities and developers, and the decision they are usually making is not whether to fence, but which fence to specify.

Palisade or mesh

Most New Zealand perimeter jobs come down to a choice between these two, and each is better at something.

Steel palisade is bolted rather than woven, so individual pales carry load independently and a damaged section can be replaced pale by pale. The vertical form makes it awkward to scale, and it gives no visual privacy at all, which is often exactly what a site wants: nobody can shelter behind it and anyone inside can be seen from outside. It is the standard choice around utility and infrastructure assets, and it is commonly run at around 2.4 metres.

Welded anti-climb mesh has small apertures and a flat face. It gives a cleaner appearance, holds up better where a fence sits along a public frontage, and does not present pointed tops. It suits schools, commercial frontages, sports facilities and any boundary where the fence has to look civil rather than industrial.

Choose palisade where the site is genuinely industrial, the perimeter is long, damage is a fact of life and replacement parts matter. Choose mesh where appearance, public frontage or the presence of children shifts the balance. Where a site has both conditions, the answer is often both: palisade down the yard boundaries, mesh across the street face.

Two other products sit in the same family. Chainlink is the low-cost option for enclosing an area rather than protecting it. Safety barriers and guardrail are what you use inside a site, protecting racking, plant, pedestrian routes and building corners from vehicles, and they answer a different question altogether.

Call 027 424 0600 to Request a Free Quote

What actually gets specified

Beyond the palisade-or-mesh call, these are the decisions that change the fence you end up with:

• Height, set by what the fence has to deter and by any district plan limits on your boundary
• Pale profile, whether flat, D-section or W-section, and how it is topped
• Rail count, since a taller fence needs more horizontal rails to stay rigid
• Fixings, from standard bolts through to security fasteners that cannot be undone with ordinary tools
• Coating, hot-dip galvanising as the base, with powder coat over it where appearance or coastal exposure asks for more
• Footings, which follow the ground rather than the fence: soft or reclaimed ground, rock, and existing concrete each need a different answer
• Gates and access, including swing or sliding vehicle gates, pedestrian gates and any access control fitted to them

Design, manufacture and installation

Design starts at your boundary. We’ll come out and take a look at the site and discuss ideas with you about the best solution for your situation, walking the line, noting the levels and the ground conditions, checking where gates and vehicle access have to fall, and confirming where the boundary actually is.

Manufacture is the workshop stage: pales, rails, posts, gates and hardware built and finished to that line and those levels, so what arrives on site fits the site.

Installation is set-out, footings, posts, panels and gates, working in a sequence that keeps the site secure while the work runs. On a boundary with a fall, the fence is either stepped or raked, and which one you get is a decision worth making at design stage rather than watching it happen.

Call 027 424 0600 to Request a Free Quote