Quote Originally Posted by Regius_049 View Post
I generally encourage people to move towards bioactive enclosures if they can. I have all my geckos/frogs in bioactive setups, but have only recently started to move the snakes over. In regards to your first question, I think a hognose snake would be a good candidate for a bioactive setup seeing as they already like to burrow, but it would require some careful attention to a few details. Hognose snakes are pretty temperate species and you wouldn't need to go too heavy on the watering/misting, but some is required for microfauna (sprintails and ispods) to flourish. However your snake will destroy your plants. A hognose is fairly small, which is pretty helpful, but they also burrow so you'd likely need to put any plants in clay pots buried in substrate.

I have no experience with biodude as I (more or less) exclusively use NEherp and glass box tropicals for my vivarium needs except for a few miscellaneous materials. People I have heard from seem to be pleased with his product and indeed I have considered it before, particularly his terra firma/sahara. However two things turned me off from using him:

1. As others have noted, his prices are pretty high. I think there are better deals to be had elsewhere and mixing your own substrate is definitely cheaper.
2. The owner, Josh Halter, used to be associated with a company called "Genesis Exotics" if I remember correctly, and it had pretty poor reviews. I don't know if it dissolved because his partner(s) were shady and the source of the bad reviews or what, but it turned me off from giving them a go.

In regards to drainage layer, you can get away without one if you are very careful with watering, but I would not recommend it. For a burrowing species like a hognose, I would do egg crate with a thick screen firmly attached to it. You want the animal to stop when it hits the drainage layer and not mix things around or shift your screen separator.
Thank you so much, very helpful! I checked out the websites, and I can very well look it up, but if anyone could give me the basics of what I need so I could price everything? Looking at those, the BioDudes stuff seems a lot more expensive. Thank you!