Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I just bought 6 new 3' visions to use with my uromastyx and beardeds. I built a rack for them since the light bulbs I was using on the uros would cause the cage above it to go over 150 degrees (this was tested before I put the animals in, no one was burned in the process) Anyway, I finally got a cage to go up to 120 degrees basking for a uro using a 15o watt ceramic bulb but three days later it caused part of the plastic dome to melt and fall into the cage. I squished it back onto where it fell off while it was still warm and reattached it but now Im afraid to put another heat light in there since the plastic is so thin, also there is about a half inch gap around the metal disk that goes below the light. I switched all my other cages to day tight beam basking lights and seem to be able to get a much higher cage temp with less wattage (Im now using 75 watts for beardies and 100 watts for uros). Was just wondering if anyone had any suggestions on how to fix a melted vision and what kinds of light bulbs to use in it. Sorry for the long post, just kinda bummed that I ruined a $200 cage in three days

Go to www.proexotics.com and read the faq section, specifically retes stacks. Or go to the Uro forum and read the posts by robin. 150 watts is a lot of energy to use in any enclosure. If you use a retes stack you can lower the wattage used. Hope this helps.
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Derek Affonce
DeKeAff Exotics
dekeaffexotics.com

Yeah. Robyn uses 45 and 90 watt halogens to heat the 10' diameter uromastyx enclosures they have, and they like to keep the temps up around 140. They do this by getting the basking spots up so that the bulbs are really close. I think I saw one picture where the heat bulb was only about 4" away from the basking uros (the lamp was behind the screen on the top of the enclosure).

Robyn seems to have a lot of really great ideas on how to raise uros, and I'm going to start applying some of them to my mali uro, and my bearded dragon.

-ryan