Finishing your Tortoise Starter Kit

Right so we have the table made, the light and heat fittings and the substrate ready.
After a few hours of pondering how I would attach the lights/heat, I managed to come up with something secure as well as easy to do. To start with the heat emitter; it came with a metal hook like thing attached for hanging it so I just drove a long screw into the end of the table leaving about 1/½ sticking out. I then hooked the lamp onto it above the slate and put the thermometer in too to gauge the temp and make sure it was ok for him. Roughly the basking area should be about 35-37C of if you’re from elsewhere 95-100F 

And that should trail off across the table to about 26C during day and dropping to not much lower than 18C during the night (80F for day and 65F at night) 

The UVB light was slightly trickier. I bought some soldering wire as it’s easy to bend and break off. I’ve put in a very crude drawing of how it was done. A brief description is the ceramic fitting is resting on the end of the table, two screws are driven into either side. I have wound the soldering wire around it twice where there is a join in the fitting so it has a little gap that it is stuck in. I then had excess wire each side making a loop out of it and securing it to a screw on either side. 

Finally the table is ready and we have got the little fella. He seems a little scared but I probably would be too if some crazy giant put me in a cardboard box...so I am leaving him alone in his new home for a bit to get used to it. I’ve picked up a bag of mixed leaves from Tesco. It has rocket, spinach etc so we will be sharing dinners as I am quite partial to a veg smoothie. One tip I was given from the pet shop owner was to spray his dinner with a water bottle like below as they don’t drink from their water dishes very often. Therefore, this is a second source of water for them.

Ok that’s enough for today my next post will be on how the little fella is getting on. Until next time see ya!