guarding in-the-cage bulbs or CHE?

[fishmommy]

Hiya
I have a ceramic incandescent fixture on the inside of my Boaphile 422d cage. I had planned on using a red light for occasional night viewing/feeding, but may end up using it for a CHE for supplemental heat.

So, my question is, those of you who run a CHE or incandescent bulb inside your snake encolosures....do you put a guard over the bulb or not?
This cage is for a BP, and it is almost 18" high. It came without any kind of guarding, but I am prepared to add something if you think it's a good idea.

If you have a guard, where did you get it/who makes it?

thanks

[dr del]

Hi,


Yeah I'd say a gaurd is pretty much indispensible - my male ball has some nasty burn scar down his side from coiling round a bulb as a baby. Apparently their instinct to coil tightly when they feel pain means they **may** end up coiling tighter round the bulb and getting burnt even worse.

The best thing is to make your own out of appropriately sized mesh - just remember not to use plastic mesh near a CHE. I managed to find some good mmesh in a hardware store and just made it using a set of pliers. Make sure there are no rough edges and that the little houdini's can't get inside it especially where it attatches to the viv.

What are boaphile racks made of again? - just trying to work out how you could attatch it so it is secure but removable. Because sod's law says 2 days after fitting an immobile gaurd the bulb will fail.


dr del

[fishmommy]

rigid plastic mesh you can bend with pliers? I gotta get down to Home Cheepo and have a look around Where did you get yours?

the cage is plastic. It has a big ceramic fixture so I can probably just loosen the mounting screws and slide the guard edges under and retighten.

[dr del]

rigid plastic mesh you can bend with pliers?

No if it's for ceramics I really wouldn't chance plastic - far to high a possibility of it melting and dripping molten plastic on yer poor wee snake, not to mention the fumes plus it also tends to go brittle and eventually snap.

Heres a few pics of some of mine. It's worth noting all the snakes in these tanks are adults so if your snake is quite small you need to make sure his head can't even come close to fitting through the mesh.

It should also be said that you want to leave a fairly decent gap between the outside of the guard and the heating source in all directions.

These aint the best pictures you will ever see but if you look at the left hand side of the third guard you can see the cut bits bent over holding it all together.








They may not win any beauty contests I admit but so far they have kept the snakes away from danger.

While I'm using furniture "corner blocks" to fix them on mostly you should probably learn from my mistakes and use the ceramic blocks you can see in the third pic with ceramics as I find the small plastic ones can melt if the heater is full on for any length of time. Even bits of metal meccano might work.


dr del

[fishmommy]

Wow, thank you very much!