Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I like to move my lighter plastic container enclosures to the bathtub to clean and disinfect them but I can't do that for the bigger, heavier wooden enclosures. How do you clean and disinfect these enclosures that you can barely move by yourself without any help from anyone?

We use a heavy-duty all-purpose cleaner for cleaning all the walls and tubs, just to get the poop (our igs like to fingerpaint). This involves first wetting down the walls with cleaner, then scrubbing the bejeezus out of it with a stiff brush, if the terrarium has gotten particularly dirty.After that, we rinse the walls with a 3-gallon garden sprayer (you know, the pump-handle jobbies that you can get in Home Despot or other gardening place for fertilizing/insecticiding/watering). That pump sprayer also comes in handy for misting the animals a couple of times a day... Once rinsed (and, if you don't have a drain or shop vac, you might have to rinse in sections so that you can dry it up, dry it all out (camping towels or car-drying cloths [the ones that absorb a *boatload* of water, but are only about twice the size of a handkerchief] are handy for this...)

Once it is clean, we grab a spray bottle and spray a fine mist of disinfecting solution (If you know an Amway dealer, Pursue is a good one, and LOC is a good one for the general cleaning; if not, I'm sure other products work well, too) on the walls. The whole point beind the fine mist is that it sticks to and wets the walls, without running down them.
Let that sit for a good 10 minutes or more and wipe it up.

You might also spray peroxide between the cleaning and the disinfecting, if the enclosure is heavily scented. Does a great job of clearing up ground-in poop smells...
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Justin, Julie and the menagerie...
(Bobbing igs, snapping macklots, exploring ball, hungry kings, hyper grey rat, quacking tribs, hissing roaches, wriggling worms & chirping crickets)
Vermont Herpetological Society Online
www.vermontherps.org

Another option, for critters like igs that tend to poop in/over water (or find one preferred spot to poop-bomb), is to get a baby tub. Sink that into the floor of the terrarium where the ig likes to poop. Keep a couple inches of water in there and iggy can come down to take a drink and/or a swim before the morning constitutional. After they poop, you just pull out that tub, carry it over to the toilet, dump, scrub, disinfect and replace...

We ended up using two tubs. One permanently attached to the floor of the terrarium and siliconned into place, so no water splashes out and soaks into the wood, and the second just nests inside that.

Still, every now and then, you gotta get in there and clean the walls and other surfaces... Sometimes they miss (and occasionally, missing is even accidental)...
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Justin, Julie and the menagerie...
(Bobbing igs, snapping macklots, exploring ball, hungry kings, hyper grey rat, quacking tribs, hissing roaches, wriggling worms & chirping crickets)
Vermont Herpetological Society Online
www.vermontherps.org