Exciting news! & a hangup

So, exciting developments on the moving front!

Moving the horse, that is.

As is apparent from my earlier posts, I'm not totally thrilled with my boarding situation right now.  It's almost 40 miles away, takes 50 minutes to drive to, is expensive at $260/month (when hay out here is dirt cheap), and I don't feel welcome there.  The property owners are sometimes rude and unprofessional, and I've had to fix dangerous conditions in my horse's pen myself (or they don't get fixed!).  I also get in trouble for scrubbing out my horse's water bucket.

SO!

I finally found some property for rent in Douglas!  IN DOUGLAS!  Whoo hoo!  Only 10 minutes away!

It's a four acre property with a small, nice one stall barn and attached 7' x 15' cement floor hay storage/tack area.  The gentleman who owns the property is very sweet and knowledgeable, lives right there, wants to help with horse care--and there's even the potential of renting an arena to ride in that's just down the road.  There are also miles of back roads to ride on.  And it's only $100 a month.

The hangup?

It's all barbed-wire fenced.

Just like EVERYTHING is out here.

Even the boarding facility Chev is out at now has barbed wire, but I don't allow her to be turned out in those areas.

I am just not comfortable with barbed wire, even in a four-acre pasture.  Barbed wire is NOT horse fencing, and even though people seldom have a problem out here, I just know my horse, who is very accident prone, and who has never seen barbed wire, would get seriously injured on it, and I'm just not willing to take that risk.

So I have spent all morning and into the afternoon researching how expensive it will be to do an inside-perimeter fence of hot tape at the Douglas place.  There isn't power in the barn or pasture, so I was able to find an excellent, high-output solar powered fence charger that would work well for 4 acres for less than $200 (on major sale!).  I almost save that much the first month by moving her out to Douglas.

I also found good 15-strand steel, 1.5" white hot tape that's a good deal--$160 shipped for 2,640 linear feet because the spools have some breaks in them instead of being one, continuous strand.  Or, I could get 2,640 lf (4 spools) of unbroken, 1/2" Rutland polytape for $77 shipped (so far!  Ebay bids could go up I guess).

The thing I'm really worried about is the t-posts and t-post caps, which are both quite expensive for an area this large.  Plus I need to cap all the existing t-posts too--a lot of money!  I really don't want to hook the hot tape up to the barbed wire posts unless I have to.  I was hoping for a good 5 feet of skidding distance between the interior, hot-tape fence and the exterior barbed wire. (A friend of mine just told me she could get me t-post caps wholesale, whoopieee!)

I would love your thoughts on how to re-do fencing, costs, anything you want to add!

UPDATE:  I was able to get 4 rolls (2,640 feet) of Rutland 1/2" polytape on ebay for $78 shipped!  I think this will work well for the lower 2 strands of hot tape.