Here are some pics of the new cages we've been working on. They are in our living room and I find myself watching the snakes more than the TV now.
We knew cleaning the bottom cages would be a pain with the drop down doors, so we built brackets instead of using hinges on the bottom cages. This way we can lift the doors out of the way.
We put ventalation holes half way up the back on one side and in the top of the door glass on the other side to have good cross ventalation.
We used LED rope light mounted in the ceiling. We routed a groove 5/16 inch deep and 1/2 inch wide for the 1/2 inch rope light. It fits snug, but we still used some silicon to make sure it doesn't fall out. We tried using the incandescent rope light, but it heated the cages up too much, even on a dimmer.
The whole thing is heated using flexwatt. We routed a recess in the bottom of the floor about 3/8 inch deep. Then reinforced the floor with 3/4 inch square steel and used reflectix to keep from heating the cage below.
We used 2 Herpstat Pro's and 1 Herpstat II to control the heat. One Herpstat Pro controls all the hot spots and the other one controls all the ambient heat. The Herpstat II controls the top row of cages, hot spot and ambient. We also put the components for the TV on drawer slides so we could easily get to the back of them.
This is what it looks like with the lights off in the room.
This took several months to complete, but was worth it in the end.
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