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Back heat or belly heat for an arboreal rack?

N

Nathan91

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I'm thinking about building an arboreal rack for my chondros, but I am unsure of how to heat it. At first I was planning on just doing belly heat like I did for my BP rack, but obviously my chondros arent going to spend too much time on the ground. I also thought of back heat, but I'm also unsure. Any suggestions?
Thanks,

-Nathan
 
I think back heat would work better since chondros and other aboreals tend to stay on their perches, use multiple perches to allow the snake to move from front to back or up and down in the cage as needed. my $0.02
 
Oh ok. Well I want to go simple as much as possible. Probably using those plastic racks from lowes and using 56 quart (I think theyre 56 quart) tubs. The room temps fluctuate so I have to do a lot of heat control within the animal housing itself. My main concern is allowing them to have a hotspot. It seems like it would be hard to do with belly heat because theyre never on the ground.
 
How many tubs per shelf? Does the room get cool, or just too hot? Or both, depending on the season?
 
Not knowing what rack you're looking at makes it harder; but how you're setting it up, and how the tubs fit, makes a huge difference in the approach. I am personally not a fan of back heat; and would prefer to use dual side heat in most cases...but that loses some of it's desirability if you're trying to go two tubs wide.
If you get a lot of variation in room temps, you might find it beneficial to use some insulation board to partially close the rack.
 
Thats a difficult scenario to deal with, creating a proper "basking spot" can be difficult sometimes for rack keepers, and for aboreal snake keepers it can be even more difficult. When i raised up baby amazon tree boas, i kept them in rack systems with branches using belly heat with no real problems, but then again those were temporary enclosures for a few months. I would say try to incorporate a way so that you can apply either heat through a matt or tape and place it on the back wall of the tub (on the outside) so one side of the tub is properly heated from top to bottom. Im sure this is easier said than done though. Are you sure you want to do a rack system for your GTP? For me that would kind of ruin the point of keeping them, not being able to see there beautiful colors all the time.
 
I would put two perches like a wide "X" and put heat tape on the bottom/right and back/right and let the snake decide. I'm not a pro on this though.
 
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