Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I am about to start building a new viv, of approx 6'L 3'W 4'H, for some CWD and AWD's. From what I have read in books they need a fairly high humidity (~75%) and having done some research I reckon that I fogger is the way to go.

I would purchase an Exo-Terra or similar unit, but they seem very expensive (£30) and have a small membrane (16mm), are they something special because I can get 20mm membrane units for £12 or 5x20mm units for £40. Am I just being dumb?

Also I will be using sliding glass doors for the front (ie ~3'*3') what thickness of glass would you recomend, i was thinking of 6mm.

Kind Regards

Tom

Tom,

In a vivarium that large it might be difficult to keep it well-humidified using only a fogger. Unless you used several foggers chances are a single fogger won't do anything other than give you a special effects appearance in your enclosure. Using more foggers might work but even then they have a tendencey to generate a fog that settles to ground level in a still environment with little air circulation. You could possibly get around that by raising some foggers up higher in the cage. Another alternative is to use an ultrasonic humidifier and use PVC pipe to push the generated fog into the cage. Except in small dart frog enclosures I'm just not a big fan of using foggers to generate humidity. I would suggest instead looking into misting systems for generating and maintaining your humidity.
-----
Matt Campbell
25 years herp keeping experience
Full-time zookeeper
Personal collection - 21 snakes (9 genera), 20 lizards (4 genera), 6 chelonians (2 genera)

I'd have to agree with Matt - a fogger is probably not going to give you the humidity you're looking for (although it looks neat). I ran a fogger in my rainbow boa's cage (30" x 12" x 18" - that's only her juvi enclosure) for about a month as an experiment. I found that even with 75% of the cage lid covered, a fogger only increases humidity substantially for about 15-30 minutes before it begins to drop rapidly again.

But, if you still want to install a fogger for the effect, PVC pipe hooked up to an ultrasonic humidifier is definitely the way to go. This was the method I used with my fogger. The Exo-Terra ones have received very bad reviews in terms of long-term durability.

Hope this helps!
-----
::i believe in joy > http://www.winds.org/nekomi/hope.html

::my homepage > http://www.winds.org/nekomi

My Growing Zoo:

1.0 Husband (Byron) ^_^
0.1 black cat (Shade)
0.1 Brazilian Rainbow Boa (Zia)
1.0 Leucistic Ratsnake (Houdini)
1.2 Cockatoo cichlids (A. cacatuoides yellow-gold)
1.2 Panduro cichlids (A. panduro)

I have used umteen million foggers in all sorts of enclosures so I speak from experience. The two ways that work the best is useing an ultra-sonic humidifier to blow fog through the top or just use the regular fogger and place a small pc exause fan on one top of the screen to slightly stirr the for around. Useing this method i was able to raise the humidity of a 100 gallon tank to 100%. There was so much humidity that ther was a constant condensation on the glass so I had to put the fogger on a timer so it would torn off and on ever 5 minutes or so.

-----
"You can take the snake out of nature, but you can't take the nature out of the snake."
1.2.2 Crested Geckos
1.0 Spiny Hill Turtle
2.6 regular Leopard Geckos
0.0.6 blizzards
1.1.1 leucistics
0.0.4 carrot tail jungles
2.6 high yellows
2.0 albinos
0.1 tremper albino
0.1 Sulcata tortoise
1.3 dogs
2.1 cats
1.0 horse
0.2 sea horses
and 5 fish tanks with too many animals to count.