Quote Originally Posted by Skiball View Post
So outside of enclosure needs. The only real questions I have are...

What online sites do you use to order frozen feeders (of all sizes up to rabbits and how many do you buy at a time to last you how long)?
I get my rats from a local show. There are a few people there that sell F/T, and I like being able to inspect them before I buy. My girl Satin is at about 6ft/12lbs, and I feed her either a large rat every 2-3 weeks. For a while she was on jumbos every 4-5 weeks, but they just seemed too big to me so I switched back to large. I would rather feed a smaller meal a little more frequently than a larger meal less often. Boas are easy to get fat from overfeeding, so most follow the rule of thumb that prey should be smaller than the boas' circumference. I don't know if you have a show that sells feeders near you, so if you don't I can't say what sites are good to use.

What type of heaters do you use? Do they prefer belly heat as opposed to a light?
I use both a UTH and a infared 100w heat bulb. We built my girl's enclosure to 6ft long, 2ft wide and 3ft tall, and it gets chilly in the winter. The UTH is the main source of heat, and we keep it at about 88F. The light we have on a timer; in the winter it's alternating on/off every hour to keep the temps up, but in the summer we switch to a 50w bulb and go 1hr on, 2hrs off since it's warmer. Since the enclosure is melamine wood, we cut out a notch in the bottom for a glass pane to set on (we disassembled an aquarium and used two of the pieces together, since the first pane we got shattered from the heat when we accidentally rested the heat lamp on it) and caulked it in place to attach the UTH to. For the light we drilled out about a 1/2ft hole in the top, covered the opening and about an inch outward with aluminum tape to keep the wood from burning, put a metal light grate over it (it's meant to sit right next to lights, so it doesn't get hot), and cut a matching hole in a square foot piece of tile to keep it off of the enclosure entirely.

These pictures are before we put the metal tape/tile on, but just to give you the idea of the setup:




You can see in the background how the light looks.


How different of a set up/needs will she need compared to my BP?
I seem to notice with my girl (and from what others say) that their BCIs like their temps a touch cooler than BPs (~77F ambient, ~88F hotspot as opposed to ~80F ambient, ~90F hotspot), but other than that she was set up pretty much like my BP was, only in a larger enclosure. Both had UTH and an optional heat lamp just in case ambient temps needed to be bumped up, both were on aspen bedding. The only real difference with my boa (other than temps) were that I learned to appreciate a nice set of long feeding tongs. Boas are known as "garbage disposals" for a reason, and nothing stands between my girl and her food. xD I built my set up to 6ft L x 3ft W since I wasn't exactly sure how big she would get; there are two general rules you can follow with sizing: 1 square foot of floorspace for every foot of snake, or the length and width of the enclosure equals the length of the snake. My girl only got a little over 6ft, but boas are not shy and she will use every inch of her enclosure. I don't have hides in my setup because Satin never used them (she used them for about the first 2-ish weeks we had her, then she just sat on them lol), but every boa is different, and for a juvie it might help to provide them just in case.

Will a taller bin be better for a boa?
Like I (and others) said before, boas will use any space you give them.