Pygmy Hedgehog Setup

Building your Pygmy Hedgehog Setup

It's very easy to construct this pygmy hedgehog 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 at least 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 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 73-77 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 ceramic heat emitter, surrounded by a guard and controlled using a pulse proportional thermostat. As this unit does not put out any light so it can be used for both the day time and night time heating. The ceramic heat emitter is screwed into your screw fit ceramic lamp holder. They are then pinned to the ceiling with the ceramic guard which is screwed into the ceiling. We usually keep our ceramics close to the back corner but you could leave a 2 inch gap between the guard and wall.

Controlling Temperatures

In this set up the ceramic heat emitter will be controlled by a pulse proportional thermostat. Setting the therostat 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 ceramic heat emitter 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 fixed to the back wall around 1/3 of the way from the hot end and a few inches off the floor. On the face of the thermostat you will want to set the temperature to 88 Fahrenheit. This should ensure that 1/3 of the enclosure will be around 73-77 Fahrenheit all night. As the unit will only turn on when temperatures drop below 65 Fahrenheit it can be left on all of the time.

Lighting the Enclosure

As our main heat source does not produce any light we need to install a second unit to provide light during the day time. Having a regular day/night cycle will help keep your pygmy hedgehog happy and healthy. We have found the easiest way to do this without affecting the air temperature is with the LED strip lights. Simply attach them to the front or centre of the ceiling and turn on for 10-12 hours during the day, then off at night.

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