Couple of thoughts here. I generally mix my own substrates when needed. Usually I will buy bags of just plain peatmoss. Make sure it doesnt have an additives like plant food and fertizers and such. Than I mix with course sand. Though this mix isn't as ideal as a cypress mulch I have found it to work ok. If need be I will mix in a bag of just plain ground cover bark. Usually this is bark off of pine and doug fir and to be honest, I haven't had a single issue with either of those (even in shaving form when used in bedding), so I'm pretty comfortable with that.

In terms of heat, depends on what you are keeping. I've found that most of my large sulcatas and leopards have acclimated to the weather here in SoCal. However we do get the dips into the low 30's down here so I have heated tortoises houses and dogloos in each enclosure (3 enclosures in my main area). All told there are about 4-6 dogloos/houses in the entire area. Currently I use a ceramic heat emitter in each house which all feed back to a single photovoltaic controller which will kick the heat on at dusk and turn it off again at dawn.

Unless you are willing to corral all the torts into one location and just heat that one location, than you really don't have much of a choise than to provide heat in each individual cage. I prefer the ceramics mainly because they are cheaper to purchase and generally easier to fit than say a pig blanket.

Hope that helps a bit.

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