Prepping for a BCI - time to build a Bio Active Enclosure ...

[JibbaJabba]

Long story short, I ended up not going the planted route. Building planted/bioactive enclosures for heavy-bodied reptiles is hard -- exponentially harder than doing so for dart frogs, small lizards, and small snakes -- and there's a good chance you'll wind up spending more time on the garden more than the reptile should you pursue one. I decided it was more than I could chew as a novice keeper. I'd highly recommend reading Bio-Activity and the Theory of Wild Re-Creation (one of the Arcadia Reptile books) if you haven't already. It lays out the important considerations one should make when designing planted/bioactive enclosures very well, and should be mandatory reading for anyone pursuing a bioactive project (IMO).

In your case, you may be better off using artificial plants in the areas your boa will heavily traffic (ie. the floor, their perches) and only planting your live plants on the walls. They're much less likely to be trampled there. You may be able to circumvent the LED heat issue if you find a way to install screens in the ceiling of your enclosure and externally mount them. That way, the heat from the LEDs can dissipate into the room instead of the enclosure. It would also bring the added benefit of protecting your boa from burning themselves on the lights and increasing ventilation.

Good luck! Even if you wind up using more artificial plants versus real ones, I think you have a very cool looking naturalistic enclosure in the works here.

Thanks. Yea I wasn't so worried about the fact the boa is a big one ... I used to do bio actives before and with the right 'fencing' you can protect them. But what IS new for me is the fact I am using a foam background. And not just the back itself but the sides too.

What I have now found is the fact the background is a really good insulator. And that is the main issue here I think. For example, without waterbowl or anything I have an approx. humidity of 60% .. almost spot on. If I spray the whole background lightly - it shoots up to 90 and won't go down for hours. Even a day after I sprayed it was still at 85% lol ...

Another option I considered, as you suggested, was using a screen or at the very least ventilation above the lights. BUT ... I changed my mind entirely ... and that is where your other suggestion comes in.

For me it is more important to keep the right temps and humidity so I will indeed use fake plants. I will still use proper supstrate and leaflitter and the sorts, but plants will be fake (damn they are expensive here). That way I don't have to worry about full spectrum lighting and have LED strips on order.

Those won't be good enough to grow plants, hence the fake plants. Maybe in the future I go down the screen route and real plants when the thing needs an overhaul, but for now it is going on for too long and I need to pickup the snake from the rescue center soon.

So this'll do.

I received my heating panels today and I am waiting for a new 'waterbowl'. The one I built pretty much exploded when I tested it lol ... the water pressure on the sides is just too high to rely on glued acrylic so I just got a storage box on order and once that and the substrate is here I will test drive the thing for a couple of weeks before picking up the lady