Reptile & Amphibian Forums

My girlfriend recently entered the Herp world with the purchased of a Veiled Cham, about 3-4 months old. I have a good heat gradient for her little gal, but what about UV lighting? I know about Repti-sun and all those expensive "reptile bulbs", but I have always used regular UV shop lights from Home Depot for all my monitors and gators (I am a "big lizard" man) I know that veileds depend much more on the proper UV light than any of the speies I am used to dealing with, so I decided, once again, to turn here for help. Is there a cheaper, better alternaive then Repti-Sun bulbs? Do the UV bulbs you can buy at Lowes and such for like 3.99 work just as well?? Any help is immensly appreciated, and my girl thanks all of you for any help!

Those uv bulbs will only give you uva, not b. Chams (especially veileds) need the uvb to metabolize calcium. I know of a number of lizards that "need" uvb that grow up without it (a friend of mine has a monitor that is doing fine without it) but keeping veileds without it is very difficult. If you are depending on dusting solely for d3 rather than lighting then you can run into problems with over or under supplementing,a nd veileds are especially prone to mbd... cricketscritters (i hope that name is right!) has a post further down about a lady who bought some chams from her and didn't take her advice... now one has mbd.
Long story short, your best bet is to get a 5.0 or 8.0 tube by zoomed or another good herp brand. There are also mv lamps, but i am not liking them too much. My panther is looking a lot better nw that i'm back to the 5.0 flourescent. IMO they give off too much uvb if used in a small cage... There isn't much research to back it up, but neither is there to show they are fine... I'm sticking to the tubes until there is more info about mv...
Where are you located? If you/your gf can get her cham into regular sunlight all year or part of the year that will affect the ammt of time you need the bulb on, and thus it's (the bulbs) lifespan.
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~Lindsay
0.1 panther chameleon (Orion)
1.2 r. brevicaudatus chams (unnamed)
0.1 leopard gecko (Acadia)
1.0 pictus gecko (Raine)
1.1 parakeets (Bongo/Citron)
1.1 cats (Tigger/Bonzai)
1.0 dwarf hampster (Chico the monster)
someday will have 1.1 great danes (will be Osiris and Solaris)