Reptile & Amphibian Forums

any ideas as to how i can heat the 6x3x18" vision cage so it's hot enough for a tegu. the room temp. is always set at 68 degrees and i cannot get the basking site and the cool side right. does anyone house their tegu in a 6 foot vision?

warm up the room you vampire.....

j/k use higher wattage bulbs I suppose. I have two six foot visions I run two 75 watt spots in each...of course the room is about 75-78

i hear that from everyone!!!! i can't help it, i like it cold but maybe i will have to warm up the room. what's your temp under the 2 75 watt lights and in the middle of cage and cool side?

100 F or so on the hot side and around 80 F in the rest of the enclosure. I'd actually suggest keeping your basking spot a little hotter than that...I don't because my tegus do the majority of thier basking outside in the AZ sun which is about...400 F most days around here

i tried the 2 75 watt spots and it raised the hot spot to around 114 degrees but only directly under that peice that holds the dome lights, the rest of the cage was in the low 70's! i think i'm gonna just get rid of this cage, i didn't realize how hard they are to heat.

That's a major problem with Visions if they are in cool rooms.

IF they were available with conventional flat tops you could use hotter bulbs, CHEs, or radiant heat panels.

For example, I have a 67 x 30 x 18" Neodesha cage for my blue tegu. The cage is in a basement that gets down to 67 in the winter. To heat that cage properly I need a 150-watt, 18 x 24" radiant heat panel, and I also have an 18" slab of thick slate on the floor that creates a nice basking area. Even with that I need to have the panel lowered a few inches from the top of the cage to get 110 degrees on the slate and mid 80s in the cool end. I also have a 4-foot dual fluorescent light fixture inside the cage. In the cool end I have a mulch-filled hide box with an attached lid with access hole.

I wouldn't be able to have that heating and hide setup in a Vision cage because of the cage design.

Try another cage like an AP cage, or build one that will let you use the heating and lighting options you want... and need.

You need serious heating to warm up big cages in cool rooms, especially for the 110 basking and 80-plus cool end requirements of a tegu.

Bill

thanks bill, i will check kingsnake for a different cage. i thought about cutting a spot on top of the cage to put a dome light with a 150 CHE, but i figured that would melt the plastic. i just bought this thing too, oh well, it's a learning experience! thanks for the input.

Someones probably going to bash me for saying this but if your tegu is fairly mature...70 on the cool side is alright.

You could easily add a hide area on the outside of the Vision cage . An outside hide area could easily be heated with a ceramic bulb set on a rheostat .
You could set the rheostat to automatically turn on the heat when it got below 80 during the summer and below 70 in the winter .It isn't hard to cut a small hole in the side of the vision cage and attach a wooden box to it with a removable top .

Russ has a picture below of a den he added to his cage
http://forums.kingsnake.com/view.php?id=857103,857104
The den Russ built is huge ... you wouldn't need anything near that large as tegus like to sleep curled up

I wish I had that problem , here in south Florida we have the opposite (hard to keep things cool enough)
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Stella St.Pierre
www.bluetegu.com - Ron St.Pierre