Breeding/Reptile Rooms & Setups

[saisaac]

Would any of the breeders on here be so kind as to share how they have their fascilities set up? I was wondering how you have your rooms set up. I am going to be acquiring a female Northern soon and will be starting to get things set up in myhome to have a litter either this year or next depending if I get the female here and acclimated during the breeding period. I of course understand the basic needs of setting up enclosures for the adults and smaller scale set ups for the young, but I would love to see how some of the breeders here have arranged everything to be efficient and pleasing to the eye. I recall a thread a while back with walls lined by new enclosure stacks.

I am already in the process of purchasing supplies to construct a 6ftx2ft enclosure stack for the adults, but I am trying to decide how to prepare setups for the young. I might construct smaller scale enclosures for the young designed the same way as the adults to keep things uniform, but using tubs or modified aquariums might be simply a much more economical option especially starting out.

Anyways, I look forward to seeing how everyone else has theirs setup.

[Richard.C]

Mines very very basic,my room is the back section of an uninsulated tin shed,big northerns in 6x2x2 melemine enclosures;heat up one end

Babies and youngens in anything from a 2 by 1.5 foot enclosures to 3 foot by 1.5 foot cages

[dsteamn]

I use 10 gallon aquariums for babies. I also use shredded white paper for them because they are messy when they eat and poo everywhere. Its much easier to see and keep clean.

[Fatal_S]

You may be recalling my room. I have my adults in 48x24x18 black PVC stacking enclosures, which line my walls. At the far side of my room I have a shoebox size rack that can hold 70+ babies. Recently I've added a V35-11 Vision rack as well, for breeding geckos and my juvenile skinks (my new incubator is on top of my new rack). I plan to replace my old baby rack with a new vision rack or two next year (old one is made of melamine = waterlogged = bins that don't slide). As I have no room, my new rack is just sitting in the middle of the room (it's on wheels). I quite like using a rack setup for the babies - it's very easy to feed everyone quickly, and cleaning the bins just requires dumping the whole thing into the garbage (baby removed of course ). I use paper towel as substrate when the babies are young, then move to aspen as they grow up more. But babies grow very quickly, so they outgrow shoe-box size bins in no time.

[saisaac]

That is probably the one I was thinking of.

How do you keep the temperatures right in the racks for the babies?

[Fatal_S]

The bottom couple shelves/tanks in any stack will always be colder than the rest. This didn't matter much for me with my old rack, as I simply never had enough babies that I had to use all the shelves. I am having trouble with it in my new V35-11 though. I've purchased some new supplies to add back-heat to those bins, in the hopes that it evens it all out. The ideal method of course is to have one temp-regulator for the bottom few rows, and another for the rest of the rack. Unfortunately my new thermostat isn't working at the moment (cord issues), so I'm using my old one and just making do.