Tortoise Cage Heating

"Okay, so the next thing we want to talk about is the heating of your aquarium. Heating and lighting are two different things, and heating is very important. Without proper heat, your reptile is not going to be able to digest his food correctly. So, what we have here, we're looking at today is we have a heat pad, and we have a heat lamp with a heat bulb. This is pretty much all you're going to need for heating a tortoise's aquarium. What we're looking for is temperatures in the late seventies to mid eighties, with a hot spot of around ninety five degrees in one area. So what we're going to do is we're going to take our heat lamp and of course, when you're buying a lamp for heating use, you want to make sure it's got a ceramic base on it. Okay, plastic are flammable and will melt. That's a fire hazard. Also make sure that it's rated for the right wattage that you're going to be using, okay. Make sure that this is rated for the correct bulb. This one you can see is rated for a hundred and fifty watts, which is what we're going to be using today. I do recommend buying as high a wattage as possible because you never know what you might need to upgrade if your house does get cold or something, and using the improper wattage will be a fire hazard as well. So, we're going to take our heat lamp. We're going to put it on one side of our aquarium. Okay. Now in that heat lamp, which is no good to you unless you have a bulb, we're going to put a bulb. This is a infrared night bulb. This is the kind of bulb you can leave on for twenty four seven, and that's what you're going to do. You're going to leave it on all the time. This is a spot one, in particular, which means that it has this tight beam of light that it shoots down. Okay. We're going to use this because, in particular, the breeder enclosures are a little high, okay. So you want to make sure that heat is getting down to the ground as much as possible. This is a hundred and fifty watt one, which should do us as far as our temperature goes in this small of an enclosure, though depending on what the temperature of your house is, you may have to adjust that. So this is going to go in your lamp, okay. On one side of your aquarium. And then the next thing we're going to talk about using is the heat pad."