View Full Version : Heating vertical enclosures
Wow did I stir up some drama lol I was told there is no way to heat a vertical glass enclosure with only the door as the mesh without heating the room. For humidity and simplicity of acquiring the enclosure I would rather leave it that way. I know it's mostly a snake forum which would make this a lot easier since the inside top would be safe to use but for climbing lizards that can use glass is there a way to heat a solid walled vertical enclosure?
Slightly different topic I got in a disagreement if plants need any of the uv light from a fluorescent bulb. We do aquariums with glass tops or glass/plastic covers on the bulbs all the time even for bog plants and most of the full aquatic plants would still grow out of the water in normal conditions with no trimming, I have several temple plants doing that, so while I know it's a different concept aren't we blocking all uv light there and still growing plants? Shouldn't the terrestrial plants grow without any uv?
New thought.... If constant ambient temp does not need to be raised and you attach a heat mat or strip of heat tape on the outside of the glass level with a wood structure (cork flat, bark, etc....) would some heat transfer to the wood along with the warmer glass enough to give a few degree warmer resting spot? Maybe enclose it a little like a raised wood hide with side heat instead of bottom? Insulate the back of the outside of the heater to direct it to the glass or is that too much risk of overheating/shattered glass to not give it open air flow?
...plants need light, not uv. UV is for the animals not the plants. Fluorescents work good and LED bulbs work even better usually. I've only used fluorescent for my bioactives thus far...and NO UV even! ;)
I think that a uth with a thermostat stuck on the side of the cage would work well for a hot spot but it really won't raise ambients much no matter what you attempt.
I found one company claiming plants need UV and selling lights with UV for greenhouses. However, all the benefits they and more scientific sites about the reaction plants have to UV rays mentioned had to do with plants surviving outdoors and human produce benefits. None of that applies to my hardy, not flowering, pest free, well maintained indoor plants that will never see direct sunlight. It also made me wonder since we are going a lot to LED light use and even screw in combo led bulbs as grow lights that don't produce a noteworthy amount of UV. I haven't made the switch to learning how much led is needed compared to cf in a situation and how to tell the exact color spectrum that results from a combination of bulbs.
Plants don't need UV... there are very slight evidences that some plants do like a mild UV-A, but most lights generally provide this spectrum already. Generally you need lights that provide between 400 and 700nm. When looking for specific lights to grow in display vivaria, you need to check their color temperature (should be around 6500K to be white), Lm (lumen, brightness, basically), and PAR (Photosynthetically Active Radiation) values. Know that both Lm and PAR drastically decrease with distance. To grow plants in normal ~40cm high vivarium, you already need pretty damn bright light (1000+ Lm) to provide enough PAR on the bottom of the vivarium to be able to sustain good plant growth. I have a lot of success with Jungle Dawn LEDs... decently cheap and my plants love them. I use the 22W long JD and 13W for a smaller viv. Additionally in my crestie viv I use an old Zoomed LED hood that I have laying around that has LED with lenses to be able to project the light to the bottom but I also intent to change that to a JD eventually (it isn't really bright enough).
The UV won't go through aquarium glass. I am not putting the lights directly over screen. That was the disagreement. They were insistent UV was needed and UV and heat could not get in without removing glass panels for screen if the only screen otherwise is the door.
Glass blocks UVB, not UVA.
Again, plants do not need UV light at all.. Their photosynthesis works in the visible light spectrum from ~400nm (violet) to around 700nm (deep red). Their main requirements for this process are in the blue and red spectrum, hence most professional plant growth lamps have purple light. This is however not feasible in a vivarium because it's ugly, so we need something that looks like daylight (~6500 K) so that colors look natural, yet still have the proper wavelengths at the right strength available for photosynthesis. This is measured with a PAR value on those lights. Based on the distance between light and plant, and the plant's requirements (shadow, half sun, sun) an appropriate lamp can be selected to light up the vivarium.
Grow lights for vivariums are widely available in different grades and qualities. Most have either a slightly warm light or up to about 6700 K (looks like the white light on a bright overcast day). Aquarium grow lights are generally much more blue with color temps around 8500 to 10000 K because people enjoy that blue tone under water.
You can leave glass/screen top between a grow lamp without issues, the lights are usually so powerful it goes right through it without issues.
I was going to use colormax bulbs because the spectrum does even out to look white to humans but dimmer than the wattage it is actually putting out because it has both a lot of blue and a lot of red instead of larger spikes in the yellow and green where humans see best. They do believe geckos see the farther ends of the color spectrum better than humans but based on their activity level that it bothers them less than the center spectrum. Someone posted up a pic of the color spectrum in a review since you can't find it anywhere unless you are holding a box coralife_05508_lamp — Postimage.org (http://postimg.org/image/rswu8xl8t/) They also come in a 50/50 but I would think the very heavy blue lighting of a 50/50 would not work as well as a balanced blue and red 6700k. Normally it works better on aquariums because blue is blocked the least of all the light waves and I use 10,000k bulbs on even freshwater because I like the look over lower kelvin bulbs but too much blue makes leggy, less bushy plants. I would think that would have a much greater impact on terrestrial plants that don't normally have water filtered light and are more used to a balanced spectrum in the 6000-7000k range.
Seems like the spectrum of a grow light to me on that picture. I don't know the colormax bulbs first hand though. As long as it provides the right light spectrum/intensity, and the overall color temp is pleasing to look at, I guess they will do. Not sure though, they seem to be focused on aquarium lighting and I'm really not into the specifics on underwater lighting. Also there's this thing to consider called heat, now that you mention gecko's.. I'm pretty much restricted to using LED on my geckos since they can't handle much and my ambient temp in my apartment is 25 C in winter and 28 C in summer when heating and AC is off, additionally my humidity in my place is like 15-20% at all times - it's pretty much a hell to keep anything tropical and keeping humidity up without being able to effectively evaporate water using RHP, UTH, or the likes :)
Too much blue lights makes plants just very green in vivariums, but they won't get much else. You will need blue, red, and green. Even though they don't absorb much green (around 10-20%) they seem to grow in height much faster than when it is missing.
Actually the room is several degrees below ideal and I was looking for ways to make them warmer. It will be closer to 70F or 21C all summer if not occasionally below when 75F is more ideal and up to 80F but some are saying they don't heat until 60F even when breeding. Getting more info from the crested gecko group they should be fine but would still appreciate a spot to warm up periodically so if I could just make a warm hide or shelf I won't need to bring the entire ambient air temp up. I'll definitely be freezing well before 60F.
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