Reptile & Amphibian Forums

This cage is 10 feet long, 6 feet wide and 6 feet tall. the water area is 8.5 long, 2 feet wide, with a depth of 1"-16". I formed the pond with plywood, then put carpet down for padding, put a pond liner down, then coated that with 1" of tile grout, finally I painted the tile grout with pond paint to seal it.

As some of you may know, while I was building this I was also writing a detailed step by step, which I still need to finish.

As you can see in some of the pics, this cage was built for water dragons, I have both Aussie and Asian in it right now.

Thanks for looking,
Paul Kemes

Wow, very cool indeed!
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www.mplionhearts.com

How does your water system work? I want tobe able to have a constant motion like you do by using a pump, except when dragons lay waste, it's nasty. So how do you go about keeping this filtered?
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www.mplionhearts.com

I'll have to take close-up pics of the filter system, but the answer is that there are a total of 5 filters cleaning the water. The first, and biggest is a canister filter rated at 240GPH, this is the one that feeds the stream. Then there are 4 submersible filters in the water, the two sticking out of the water that can be seen in the photos are Duetto's, and the other two are way down at the far end pushing the current forward, those two are Fluval 3Plus underwater filters rated at 185GPH.
Finally, I actually have a hose plumbed into the sump-pump (this cage is in my basement)that I cut a hole through the wall and finally in through the floor of the cage, (this cannot be seen in any photos). This hose hooks up to a 350GPH pond filter pump to drain the water completely out of the cage. I built the whole water area on a slope so the water flows to one end. When the water starts to get dirty I just hook this pump up to the hose, plug it in, then 20 minutes its empty.

Hope this helps.
Paul

Oh that's very cool that you can use your sump like that. We don't have basements out here in the desert, no need for them lol. I'll have to figure out some sort of water system for mine, he needs a new one that stays cleaner longer. The bottom of my enclosure is only 4x2 and theres no way i can expand that but i want to make the bottom slanted with astroturf that leads into the other half of the bottom being a water area. I want to make a river leading down to the water area, but i'm still concerned about filtration.

I have a smaller water system in my CED's enclosure but for future upgrades I have a pump capable of 600 gph. I ust a home built filter made using 3"PVC piping with a filter system setup like this:

Water-->fiber filter-->Bio filter-->fiber-->carbon-->fiber-->pump-->back to water tray
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FB
(Watch this space for the raining viv)
0.1.1 Water Dragon (Jade, unnamed)
0.1.0 Hypomelanistic Corn (Willow)
0.1.0 Patternless Leopard Gecko (Barghesta)
1.0.0 Satanic Leaftail Gecko (Melkor)
0.1.0 Cat (Cleo)
0.1.0 Wife (Tammy)
(hmmm, not much testosterone in here...)