Bedding experiment

[jglass38]

I am anxiously awaiting results here jamie!

I love breathless anticipation... :eek:

[jknudson]

I love breathless anticipation... :eek:

Is there any other kind....?

....just sayin?

[joyful girl]

looks and sounds a lot like wood stove pellets that I use in my ferret cage

I buy those for $4.00 per 40 pound bag

[lillyorchid]

Jamie, we use that and another wood pellet animal bedding product for all the the thousands of rats we have up at the shop. You biggest rule of thumb is... don't use to much since it really does expand. You will just end up throwing a lot of it out in the end. I know we use just a little to *almost* cover one layer of the bottom of whatever kind of bin they are in. AWESOME stuff. Doesn't smell, easy to scoop out, and SUPER easy to rinse out! I use it too here at my house with all of my rodents.

[jglass38]

Its been almost 36 hours since I changed the litter. I just checked the room and as of now there is no smell. I looked in all the tubs and there are some areas where the pellets have started to break down but for the most part its still pretty intact.

[muddoc]

Hey Jamie, just to add a little to your new experiment. Monica recently decided to try a very similar product. I am not sure of the name, but it is a pelletized wood, just like waht you are using. I think we are paying $8 for a 50 pound bag. At any rate Monica has been putting a scoop of the pellets, and a scoop of regular pine bedding in the tubs (the pine is just to have some extra bedding, since it would cost too much to put all pellets in the tub). Well, I think they work great. After two weeks, there was still no smell in the tubs. The pellets had pretty much completely broken up by that time, but the smell was great.
p.s. We have a friend who actually let some tubs go 4 weeks with this setup, and he claimed that he still had no smell in his room. I think 4 weeks is a little long, maybe even a little unsanitary, hence the reason we decided on the 2 week time period. But, it appears that this stuff will keep down the smell for up to a month.

As far as the dust issue, even after 2 weeks, the dust did not seem to be as bad as when we used straight pine bedding. I hope your experience will be as good as ours, as our biggest goal was similar to yours: Remove that smell!

Good Luck with your endeavour and I look forward to hearing how your experiment turned out,

[jglass38]

Thanks for the info Tim! As of this morning there is still no urine smell which is the worst part. In the rat room there is still a smell of wood and feces but its not nearly as bad as it was. We'll see what happens but so far its pretty good.

[frankykeno]

Well dang it I got a response back from Woody Pet and it doesn't look like there are any stores close to me that sell it. I'll have to give Sweet Feed (local farm supply store) a call though and see if they stock a similar product.

[Flagg]

I use woody pet with my African soft furred rats, but stopped using it with the domestic rats. When it breaks down it gets too dusty and it seemed to aggravate their respiratory systems.

Not sure if it was the cause, but I had 3 adult males with myco flareups after using woody pet for a month or so.

I now use only aspen with the domestic rats. The Woody Pet however works great for mouse smell and doesn't seem to bother the ASF rats either.

[jglass38]

The experiment continues!

3.5 days since I started using the Woody Pet and there is still no odor whatsoever. A few of the tubs are nearly all broken down to sawdust but some are not. I see no respiratory issues at this point. All the rats are eating and drinking normally. Today I filled the water buckets completely and they didn't drink too much. Checked all sippers and they are fine. The room was around 70 when I got home. I backed off the AC a little to around 72. I continue to use Vanilla in the water.