Insulating a rack? 🤔

[BP_Mama]

Hello!

I am curious if anyone has experience insulating a rack to keep it in an uninsulated space.

I want to be clear, all my herps live inside my home and are happy and healthy. Any discussion of moving racks to my garage or experimenting with insulation strategies is currently hypothetical and would only be done with EMPTY enclosures.

I live in Pullman Washington and am hoping to be moving soon. I am planning to set up a reptile room inside my new home but am curious about the possibility of expanding into our garage. Most threads I have been able to find covering similar questions have all been geared towards much hotter areas like Florida. I am curious if insulating the racks themselves on all sides but the front might allow for ample temperature control? The humidity seems manageable and cooling seems manageable as well. The only big risks I see are the winter cold and potentially unusually high heat waves. In the case of a heat wave we could always bring the rack inside temporarily but if I were to set one up out there I'd like to keep it through winter.

I have a new ARS rack arriving soon and could experiment through the end of winter, but I will need to move some animals into it come mid spring so if I have any doubts they'll simply be inside with everyone else.

My home is a rental so I cannot make any permanent changes but we can modify the rack itself and potentialy work with temporary solutions. If I pursue this I'd like to keep my budget around 2-5k max but lower is always better!

The garage will primarily be used for storage and if we do move any reptiles out there no vehicles would be stored inside.

As a final reminder, all my reptiles live inside my home. The home I am looking into moving into has space for all my reptiles to be inside my home. This is all still hypothetical and I have no intention of putting my animals at risk by proceeding without ample research and testing.

[Armiyana]

This is a good question...I don't really notice too much of a difference in temperature range between my open sided rack and closed in rack. So I wonder how boxing them with insulation would work and change it.
I'm in SoCal though and the worst is my house is hitting 60 at night so it's not a huge shock to the thermostat.

I think my only concern would be the draft from the front airflow... But I don't think it would be as bad on the reptiles as it is on things like small mammals or birds. Maybe adding a hidebox in there would help as well.

[Bogertophis]

I'll give this a thumb's down, sorry. I used to live in So. Calif. so I can agree with Armiyana's post that it "might" be possible in that climate, but not elsewhere- not in most places. When I lived in the So. Calif. desert, I raised tons of rodents in my attached & finished 4 car garage, but it required a ducted swamp cooler for the summer to keep rodents alive & well.

I now live where winter gets below freezing & summers bake us over 100*. The only thing that ever lives in my garage* are the mice I raise (*which is finished & attached to my home, btw- that helps a lot). It's way too hot in summer, so they spend summers in my laundry room. The winter is easier for them to cope with, because they're warm-blooded with a high metabolism, but it requires insulating their lab cages thoroughly & providing plenty of bedding & high quality food & of course, they have "room-mates". My garage can get into the 40's & it takes vigilance to ensure their health & safety. When I clean cages, I run a space heater for a while.

If you tried this with a heated & insulated rack of snakes, you'd have quite a heating bill, because the heat goes up & out, while cold drafts come right in- you have to have some air circulation, after all. The amount of heat required might also be a safety issue? But you could always try it (without animals) & see if you can somehow make it work- I'm just not optimistic for the outcome. I have never even brumated snakes in my garages, just because there's too much temperature fluctuation. Also more risk from uncontrolled insect pests that can sneak in unobserved.

But do test this out without animals involved, & let us know how it goes? Others have asked about this (or tried this?) from time to time. It would be nice to put the matter to rest. The only way it would make sense to me is to have a contained space within that garage surrounding the rack(s). The way a "greenhouse" contains warmth around plants...not necessarily solid walls, but some way of containing warmer air around the racks. A lot of trouble, it seems to me?