Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I just moved into a house with a basement, and its kinda cold down there, do you all heat your basements or is the cages enough.
I check the temps and under the light and by the heater is right but where they are the temps are cooler. Any suggertions.

Thank you
Jeff

if a car is traveling at 60 mph into a wind that is blowing at 90 mph how long will it take the car to drive 60 miles? answer...60 minutes because the car is still doing 60 mph. the wind speed has nothing to do with it. same with your tanks. the temp of the basement has nothing to do with the temp of your heated tanks. unless you dont have lids or screens on them. but if you are heating them and the thermometer says 85 degrees then thats the temp regardless if it is 45 degrees in the basement or not.

My guess is your basement is an unfinished one.. I suggest doing something to somewhat separate the area the enclosures are in from the rest of the basement (such as building a sheet rock wall or atleast hanging some sheets to help lower the loss of heat). I also say ignore the first poster completely, his thought is okay in theory, but what will you do if one of your heat sources goes bad and you have an animal that is left in the cold room without supplemental heat and catches RI or worse yet dies from it? I also suggest picking up an oil filled heater to help raise the ambient temps in the entire room to a more suitable level..

Good luck..
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Randall L Turner Jr.
www.aircapitalconstrictors.com

insulate and sheetrock your basement...depending on the size of basement and how many cages you are heating, it would warm up just from the cages.

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Randall L Turner Jr.
www.aircapitalconstrictors.com

id probably say "that sucks. oh well, better him than me" sorry if thats crude but when it comes down to it, im the most important creature in my home.

You have already received some good advice. But if you are renting or otherwise unable to add insulation, drywall, etc., there might be other options.

I live in South Dakota and have a room in my garage which is not insulated save for the ceiling (which really helps).

I simply stapled up some Reflectix foil/bubble insulation onto the walls, ceiling, and over the hollow-core door.

I then heat the 7'x7' room with an oil-filled, radiator-style space heater and it does a great job. I'm able to heat the room to 80* easily with the heater on its lowest setting - even though it's cold here now.

If you have a small area of the basement you could tape some of this insulation to the walls and then make a drape out of it to section off the areas without solid walls.

Or you could simply hang a bunch of it in a big circle and keep you snakes inside of that.

I do recommend one of these radiator style heaters over all other space heaters. I also recommend running it though a thermostat rated for 1500 watts minimum.

This picture shows my tiny snake room. We're moving soon so I could not justify insulating the wall cavities for one winter.

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Current snakes:

1.1 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Silver/Yellow)

3.4 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Green)

2.1 Gonyosoma janseni - (Black)

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Randall L Turner Jr.
www.aircapitalconstrictors.com

n/p