I'm planning on getting a male/female pair of red eyed crocodile skinks soon, and I just have a couple questions about housing.

First, I've read that you should have a couple inches of cypress mulch in their cage to maintain humidity, but I'm extremely paranoid about having any kind of loose substrate in reptiles' enclosures, so is impaction EVER a problem for this species? I assume, of course, that you'd need to feed them out of their enclosure so that none of the mulch gets in their food.
And how do you go about cleaning the mulch? Do you just search for any droppings and pick them out? How often does there need to be an entire substrate replacement?

My next question is about water. I will, of course, provide a large water dish for them, but I absolutely hate dealing with water changes. So is there an inexpensive filter that I could buy at Petsmart or something that would make it so that I wouldn't have to change the water very often? Even with a filter, how often would you recommend a water change?

Finally, I've read many differing opinions about heating and UVB. Is a 5.0 UVB REALLY necessary? And, in your experience, does this species appreciate a heat pad, or do they generally ignore it?

I appreciate any advice!

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