Milk Snake Setup

Building your Milk Snake Setup

It's very easy to construct this milk snake setup. The vivarium and cabinet come with instructions and should take around 20 minutes per unit to construct. They mostly use locking screws so don't worry if you make a mistake, they can be taken apart and re-built. Once the vivarium is constructed you will want to seal the joints inside with aquarium sealant. This will extend the life of your vivarium and keep the joints water resistant. Make sure the panels are all clean and as dry as possible before applying. Once applied you will want to leave the enclosure for 6 hours so the silicone can set and the fumes can disperse.

For the following sections the cables for each piece of equipment will be fed through the vents at the top or bottom of your enclosure's back wall. The Vivexotic range now include removable vents large enough to fit the entire plug through so you should not need to re-wire any plugs.

Creating the Basking Area

This enclosure is designed to get to 90 Fahrenheit on the hot end but still leave the other side cool. To do this you will want to choose one end of the enclosure to be your hot end and one end to be the cool end. All of your heating equipment needs to be placed in the hot end.

We provide our daytime basking temperatures using a single basking spot lamp in a screw fit holder. It should be pinned to the centre or rear of the ceiling close to the warm side and surrounded by a guard. Ideally we want 1/3 of the enlcoure to be hot so we would usually space the bulb out 3 inches from the side wall.

Night time Heating

In this kit the night time heating is provided by a heat mat. These can be harmful so we need to make sure they are always guarded and controlled by the appropriate thermostat. The heat mat rests on the floor on the same side as your basking bulb. It is then buried in your your substrate. On the outside of the enclosure the heatmat is plugged into your on/off thermostat.

Controlling Temperatures

In this set up we don't usually control our basking lamps. Instead we will keep an eye on the temperature using a simple thermometer placed on the warm end. If temperatures are too high we reduce the wattage of our basking lamps and if they are too low we would increase the wattage of the basking lamps. The ideal day time basking temperature is 90 Fahrenheit.

At night the heat mat is controlled by an on/off thermostat. Setting the thermostat up is very easy. Your thermostat will have 3 wires attached to a central box, on the central box is a dial with a list of temperatures around it's face. One of the wires ends in a plug, this is plugged into your power source. The second wire will end in a socket, you plug your heat mat into this. The third wire ends in a sensor, this can be fed into the enclosure through one of the bottom vents and should be rested on top of the area in which your heatmat has been buried. On the face of the thermostat you will want to set it to 75 Fahrenheit. This should ensure that 1/3 of the enclosure's floor will be kept warm all night. As the unit will only turn on when temperatures drop below 75 Fahrenheit and your day time temperatures are much higher than thisit can be left on all of the time.

Running the Enclosure

This setup is designed to provide an intense basking area during the day then a warm floor during the night. The basking lamp should be on for 10-12 hours per day and off all night. When the basking lamp has been turned off the vivarium will begin to cool down, when it gets below the set temperature your thermostat will turn on the heatmat and keep one side warm for you.

If you have any concerns or need any further advise please let us know.