Quote Originally Posted by jfaria1891 View Post
your missinformed but you make a good point none the less. in my case i have only paid $245 for my 4 snakes and about 180 building the rack for them... and this season i only have one female thats ready and my only male is a pastel so at most im going to have 1 clutch and its going to be female to pastel with the best odds probably a $400 clutch at most with which money i plan to buy a VE-200 which i will use to run my rack and then when i need my incubator the VE-200 will run the incubator and let the ranco run the rack for the 60 some odd days with a zoomed tstat as a failsafe the zoomed i have now so ill already have that and it will make a perfect failsafe for the ranco. honestly i am insulted to think that you think i would honestly put my snakes at risk due to shear ignorance, i have done my fair share of research and after all this is a HOBBY rent and bills comes first or me and the snakes will be on the streets with nowhere to plug in my fancy VE-200 or my herpstat 8. im trying to safely make ends meet here and i feel like im succeeding i was only asking for advice on which seemingly equal one was better.

and there is my rant see i can do it too

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i have the rack and i have the bins and i have a cheap supplier for hoppers, i got this
Please do not take this the wrong way but...

Ok so if it's a $400 clutch, how much of that $400 is going to be spent raising the babies?

These are all approximations but here's a bit of a breakdown:

Wood/Melamine/PVC, etc: $40
Flexwatt or another heating device: $25
Tubs for each baby in an average sized clutch of 5-7 eggs: $25-$30
Food to feed the babies before you send them off to their new homes:
-$1 per fuzzy rat = $5-$7 PER FEEDING of each snake
-5 successful feedings before they go to their new homes (at $5-$7 per feeding x 5 feedings) = $25-$35. And that's IF they successfully eat every food item offered to them. Keep in mind BPs can be notoriously hard to get started, so think about double or even tripling these costs if you are feeding f/t and have to throw some of the rats away. So let's assume $100 for the cost of getting them started

GRAND TOTAL of raising this clutch: $190-$205. And that is on the very low end of things. The feeding costs may actually be much higher, as this approximation is BEST CASE scenario of all of them deciding to feed quickly and steadily, and you selling them and getting them out of your rack AS SOON AS they are ready to go. In my experience, this DOES NOT happen. You end up hanging on to babies longer than you think you will. Also, I didn't even factor in advertising costs to get people to buy the babies, hydro & electricity charges, the fact that you may have to buy ANOTHER thermostat for your baby rack, since BP clutches take anywhere from a couple of days to a week to fully hatch out. In which time, you may want to move the babies into their own tubs, which will need heat. You're going to have to deal with the fact that ball pythons aren't usually sold for what they are advertised as, and you may end up only making 1/2 - 2/3rds of what you're expecting. Their prices drop each year, etc.

NOT TO MENTION, what if you lose this clutch due to temp fluctuations? Then you're out the $ that you were going to use to purchase a better thermostat, and you're out 1 year of breeding. You would have to buy a proportional thermostat out of pocket, or risk losing all the eggs again in the next year.

I'm not saying Johnson or Ranco thermostats are BAD, I'm just saying in my own personal opinion, I would never use one for incubation. And I'm not going on a rant here, I just want you to see it from the perspective of people who actually try & make money in this biz. It's not easy. There are an astronomical amount of costs that people forget to factor in, and I just wanted to make you aware of them.