enclosure heating

[ChameleonMD]

I'm looking at building a nice enclosure for my boas and pythons, and just have a quick question regarding lighting and heating - its going to be basically an all-wood enclosure, minus some mesh on the side, and maybe some plexi up front on the door, but am kind of unsure how i should go about heating the sucker? UTH, bulbs, and if so, how should i mount these to prevent our little guys from burning themselves?

[Dom]

U have basicaly said the description of my cages .. lol..

How I work is with 3 main heat source .. One, room temperature .. two .. a heat pad as a basking spot and 3 a light bulb on only during the day covered by a squared meshing box .. any light bulbs works .. depends on how much heat you are looking for..

You can use flood lamps wich emit A HUGE quantity of heat (I doubt u will need that) to any of the small uth 100 watt light bulbs.. or even a nomal common light bulb!

Just make sure the box is strong enough to hold a snake a far enough from the light that they can not burn themself..

Hope I make sense
Dom

[lance]

dom now youre hoping you make sense yesh
lol
yeah it seems to make sense i'll try it

[Edwin]

Right now, I just use a 100w CHE. It creates a basking spot at about 91-92 deg F. I also have an undertank heater for use in the summer when the A/C is turned on. I do not recommend reptile light bulbs as they do not last very long, and are expensive to replace.

[ls1grrrl]

How large is the enclosure going to be? We have a 4x2x2 enclosure we built (of melamine) for one of our BCIs. For heating, we just use 1 1'x2' radiant heat panel mounted to the top of one side. The panel is hooked up to a rheostat and regulated down to provide a gradient of 90* basking spot just under the panel to a cool spot of 79* or so, with an ambient temp of about 83*. At night the temps drop 4-5* just due to the change in room temp. For lighting, we mounted a flourescent light fixture we got from Home Depot. The cost of building this enclosure including all the wood, fixtures, dual-zone thermometers (w/ hygrometer) and heat panel was around $300.

Here are a couple of pics:

[Jotun]

1st question: how much would an enclosure like that cost?
2nd: How hard would it be to make one?
3rd: Wouldn't a UTH be a good way to heat during the night? It's what I use in my beardie enclosure and it works wonders witha 60 watt ceramic heat emiiter

[ls1grrrl]

Originally posted by Jotun
1st question: how much would an enclosure like that cost?
2nd: How hard would it be to make one?
3rd: Wouldn't a UTH be a good way to heat during the night? It's what I use in my beardie enclosure and it works wonders witha 60 watt ceramic heat emiiter

It cost us about $300 total to build the cage and pay for all the fixtures (light and heat panel), wood/melamine for the cage itself and the stand we built to support the melamine cage, all the hides, wood and other cage "furnishings", the dual-zone therm/hygrometers, etc.

It wasn't very difficult to build - as long as you plan ahead and measure correctly all you really need to be able to do is hammer and use a drill and screwdriver. Home Depot can cut everything for you as long as you know the measurements. (We did some of the cutting etc, ourselves just b/c my bf is a "handy" guy.)

We didn't bother trying out a UTH. It may or may not have been effective in the enclosure. We figured if we could have 1 heating device which provided the exact gradient we wanted, then why bother tinkering with trying to get a UTH and possibly multiple CHEs working properly? You'd spend about as much for the UTH/CHEs as you would on 1 radiant heat panel, and the heat panel can easily provide just about any temp range we could possibly want. It really all just comes down to a matter of preference. We haven't had to make any special room temp. adjustments, and we don't have to tinker with adjusting the heating devices to provide a night drop.

All we have for this enclosure is a timer to turn the light on and off, and a timer which kicks on a fan every few hours to keep the humidity from getting too high. Minimal maintenance is required - just spot cleaning daily as needed, fresh water daily, soaking/baking the reptibark every month or so.

We're lazy, or at least as lazy as possible while still taking the best possible care of our animals, so we try to automate as much as we can with each of our enclosures.

[norman]

where can you get the heat panel thing and how much was it?