Posted by:
rainbowsrus
at Thu Feb 26 15:34:15 2009 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by rainbowsrus ]
First and foremost cost reducer is insulation. I am fortunate that the house I bought has one downstairs bedroom designed as a inlaws or guest quarters. The original buyer opted for the "privacy" option which was to add insulation to the interior walls to deaden any noise. Great for me as that added insulation holds the heat in better. That bedroom houses my rainbow boa collection. I do not heat that room since all the individual cage heaters warm the room to a nice 70 - 75 degrees. The adult BRB enclosures need a hot end of 82 max so works perfectly as is.
I built a second room in my garage to house my BCI collection. Insulated it very well based on my experience with the BRB room. Of course BCI need a higher temp so I ended up using a oil filled electric heater to maintain room temps so the individual cages were not working so hard.
IMO the room ambient temps should be 5 - 10 degrees lower than the cool end of the cages. This seems to work great for me and allows for a good thermal gradient in the cage.
Of course each individual collection and house will have different requirements but a dedicated herp room is great for your animals. Allows us to provide a environment closer to optimal. One problem I can see is having a large variety of species with very different needs in the same room. The room itself needs to be controlled to the lowest temp and lowest humidity species (not necessarily the same one) with caging that can make up for species with higher requirements.
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Thanks,
Dave Colling
www.rainbows-r-us-reptiles.com
0.1 Wife (WC and still very fiesty)
0.2 kids (CBB, a big part of our selective breeding program)
LOL, to many snakes to list, last count:
26.49 BRB
20.21 BCI
And those are only the breeders 
lots.lots.lots feeder mice and rats  
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A lot depends..... - rainbowsrus, Thu Feb 26 15:34:15 2009