Well, I finally got my new Vision CB70 rack set up and I just love it. I got it from Bruce at Twin Cities Reptiles here in St. Paul. It was nice to see what one looked like in person before buying it, and the price was actually cheaper then getting it online when you take shipping charges into account.
Here are a few pics of how it looks from various sides.
Here it is from the Front.
Here is a pic from the side, You can see all of the ventalation holes on each level and the locking wheels
Here is a shot from the back with the heat cable already installed.
The rack comes with two thirty foot lengths of heat cable which you can string up any way you want. I used one cable on one side of the back of the rack and the other cable on the other side of the back. If you wanted to, you could have two different heating zones in each tub.
Here is a close up of the heating cables installed on a couple of levels, if you look close, you can see the probe of my thermostat next to the heat cable on the bottom level.
One of the things that I like about these racks is your ability to modify them so easily. Here is a closeup picture of one of the plastic spacers between the levels. The spacers are made out of 1" I.D. black poly tubing that slides over one of the 6 metal poles that support the rack, you put a spacer on each of the poles between each of the levels and you can modify them to fit any height tub you want to use. As the rack came to me I could have used the spacers it came with for a snug fit on sterilite 41 quart tubs (I think the tub model# is 1960?). Since I had bought some of the Iris CB70 tubs for this rack the fit was a little loose, so I cut 1/8" off of each spacer and now it's just perfect. If you had other sized tubs that you wanted to use, the black poly tubing can be bought at home depot for only $23.00 for a 100 foot roll. You could cut spacers to any size you like.
Here is a finished pic of the rack set up with snakes in it. I've got three carpet pythons in the top three levels, and female ball pythons in the bottom 8 levels. I've got 11 total levels with it set up like this.
All in all, I really like this rack system and will probably be getting more like it in the future. I've been building my own melamine racks for years, and they work fine, but these are SO much more easy to move around and clean. So much easier to modify for different tub sizes, and so much easier to set up and take down. And with the price of these, it's getting tougher and tougher to justify the time and expense it takes to build a melamine rack.
Mark
