Chuck: Zoo Med ReptiTherm habitat heater. It’s food prep montage.
All right so I hope you guys enjoyed that little feeding montage, food prep montage. That’s what I do every Sunday for Bossk, Tiamat, Lucky, and the baby spiny-tailed iguanas. Definitely Bossk, Tiamat, and Lucky. The babies I feed them grub pie practically three or four times a week, crickets, greens but they’re more insectivorous.
As I’ve mentioned many times, Bossk, Tiamat and Lucky get typical iguana salads throughout the week and then I give them their protein on Sundays just how you saw me do it. Super worms is the staple, generally, I give them grub pie. I’ll give them crickets, doobie, hornworms as treats. Hi, Lucky. The whole purposes of today’s video is I want to add some additional heat to Bossk and Tiamat’s enclosures and one of the great things about these hybrid enclosures from customcages.com is right in the company’s name and that’s custom.
I don’t know if you can see in the back, that orange cord so the orange cord is to that extension cord that is on the inside and it goes to this heat lamp that kicks on it’s own, the thermostat kicks on on very cool nights. The orange cord goes through a cord grommet in the back corner. I have another one, perhaps you can see a little better over there. I have a Zoo Med heat mat that I want to install underneath all of this stuff.
As you can see, there’s some insects and some grub pie left over where Tiamat came in and bothered Bossk. I’m going to go ahead and get the mat over here and then I got to get all my foliage out of the way because I’m going to have to crawl back behind this corner here in order to get to my cord grommet. I’m going to do my best to show you guys how I access it and all that stuff. So, let me get busy.
Let’s do a little unboxing here. Zoo Med ReptiTherm habitat heater. One thing that’s interesting about these is the one that I’ve had for several years now came actually with a little thermostat element. The newer ones I don’t think come with anything to control the temperature and I believe it is recommended that you do use a thermostat with these so I do have a Zoo Med thermostat that I was using with the ceramic heat emitter that I’m not using anymore so I just got to figure out where the probe should go that is iguana friendly, iguana proof per se. As I’m tinkering around in here and my GoPro just chirped at me, let me turn it off. I hope I didn’t leave it running.
Let’s go ahead and it is warm back here so I’m starting to sweat. See if you guys can see. Here’s the thermostat and here’s the probe. Too small for my own good and I had to thread it through this [unintelligible 00:08:51] here. Let me undo that. Got the probe. Set you there. I’ll need a pair of scissors back here because I got it wire tied down. It’s not plugged in anymore. All right. Thermostat’s all ready. Now, let’s get to work figuring out where we’re going to put the heat mat. What makes it tricky is I’m not just dealing with a flat bottom, I’m dealing with, let’s see, I’ll lift the camera a little bit, the foam base of the replica furniture. It’s not just that I can set it flat. It’ll make it a whole lot easier if I could but that’s okay, I love the furniture, the furniture looks great. I’m going to have to upset Bossk I think because I’m going to move his entire log with him in it. Big boy there’s a doobie roach. Okay, big boy, you stay right there.
What I need is an 18×18 inch square and I think that will suffice. We shall see. Perfect. My goal is going to be– I have go around. Try to get it flush to the back if I can, I don’t know what’s underneath there. Sometimes when you try to secure stuff and then you’ve got to go back in and work with it, you give yourself a little extra work to do but that’s okay, that’s why we do this because it’s fun. A little extra work never hurt nobody. All right. The furniture is squared away.
Now let’s change this angle a bit, we’re inside the cage. Okay. I’m going to stop this one for a second. All right. Well, I don’t know if you can see, you should see the little tab. Basically, we pinched the tab together and I’ll show you around the other side. Basically. Sure Chuck, pinch the can together. There we go, [unintelligible 00:13:25] harder. Proving to be a little bit harder to pinch than I thought. Maybe I need to go get a pair of pliers. There we go, I got it. Okay. We’ll stop it back here.
All right. What I was talking about, the tab is that right there so I had to pinch that together and that way I could pop off the cover that’s on the outside. This one goes on the inside and together, they make this little gap and that way you can run your cords through there. Set you there, grab my cord and just try and get through. All right. There’s the end of the cord but like I said, we also want to do a thermostat. The probe has to come in somehow and that’s what’s going to get tricky because where do I put the probe?
Now I’ve seen other videos of people using these things, the mats without a thermostat and I’ll test this just to see if that’s something I can do and then I’ll just unplug it. I always want to follow the manufacturer’s recommendations. There is my probe. I think what I’m going to do is put the probe underneath the mat. Let’s go back to the drawing board. Leaving you like that. There’s a little lip down the middle the framing of the cage that I think would be perfect. The probe is right dead in the center.
Now, let’s see how easy this is going to be. Easy being relative of course. Let’s put you back over here. Just want to zoom in so you can see the probe, the orange extension cord that’s going to the heat lamp and the cord that’s going to the heat mat all through there. Now I got to go get the back piece and press it on there to secure it. That’s what I’m going to attempt to do right now. This is the temperature controller that came with my other heat mat, the first one that I bought and it’s just off low, medium high.
I have it set, what do I have it set, it’s between low and medium, I think I’m going to put it a little closer to medium. This is the one I just plugged in so I set it for 95. It’s getting warm to the touch, the indicator light’s on so it’s plugged in. I’m going to put that log back across it but between this foam base and the foam base over there, it’s going to be on it but not full weight on it. Let’s go ahead and get reset up. See if Bossk is going to mind being messing with him some more. Hey big boy.
I can still see the indicator light on. There’s Bossk in there. Hopefully, that’ll get nice and warm for him. What prompted this is he’s spending an awful lot of time in that log whereas on my little surveillance camera there, throughout the day I can see Tiamat basking and just traveling all over the enclosure. Bossk, not so much. I was a little worried that maybe he was staying a little cool. Definitely to me stays very warm out here and I got plenty of excellent basking spots and this comes on at night.
Space heater for the entire enclosed area that’s kicking on. Keeps it in the mid-70s so with the basking spots. I am hoping that this will be sufficient to help keep Bossk warm, I just got to keep an eye on it. Did I set it? Nope. Okay. We’ll see. Cord grommets, debris catch, locking doors. I really do need to keep highlighting Custom Cages because they’ve been good to me, man, it is warm out here. I hope you guys enjoyed that little bit of Sunday maintenance on Bossk and Tiamat’s enclosure out in the garage while we’re waiting for the weather to warm up. A little feeding montage I did at the beginning.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask and if you like these iguanas, think you would make a good iguana owner, I do have plenty of baby Honduran spiny-tailed iguanas from Bosk and Tiamat. Just message me and we can work something out. Tiamat coming back out. I scared her earlier she flew into that log. That’s it for now, it is awful warm out here so I am going to go cool off. I think there’s a new episode of The Zoo on Animal Planet tonight at eight o’clock, highlights the Bronx Zoo. I love that show. Until next time, take it easy.
