I have researched a bulb from Big Apple Herps, which is their new brand but looks to be a good bulb, which because of price and the specs decided to purchase one. What I have been working with is most of the new Mercury vapor bulbs are longer than say a regular 150 watt zoomed basking bulb. Since I am somewhat concerned about the health issues involved with some of these new bulbs I prefer to house them in a dome fixture as opposed to attaching them to the top of my cages and having them uncovered. The dome fixtures seem to be about 10” wide but not deep enough to accept these new bulbs without the bulb touching the screen. I prefer to have a screen ¼” mesh to set the bulb on. Anyway you may not have run into this problem, if you do read about the Big Apple Herps one it’s not going to fit, and one of the others that I purchased fits, but still sits on the screen.
So I decided to get domestic in my shop today and I took a regular ceramic top 8.5. Dome lamp, and then cut the top of a 10” brooder dome bottom. Put them together with four 6/32 x 3/8” screws with washers and nuts and extended the depth of my lamp holder to 9 inches or so in depth. This allows me to screw in any mercury vapor bulb and still be ½ to ¾ of an inch from the bottom of the bell and above the screen comfortably. The manufacturer of all the bulbs insists for optimum performance your bulb should not touch the screen. Perhaps you have designed your cages etc. so this hasn’t been an issue, or you may be using fluorescents as I do on some of my other reptiles; but for the sake of conversation, encase some of you do run into the problem I’m thinking this worked well. Most of us have extra domes hanging around (or at least some of us –LOL!) so I thought I would pass along to you all….I believe you can buy the 10” brooder bell housings with out the fixture if your interested in getting into such a project.
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Phrynosoma.com
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signature file edited. [phw 11/14/04]
