Help on some lighting heating questions!! Sulcatas leopard!

[Sal]

Ok guys let me tell you guys what i have going on with my setups. I have 2 wonderful tortoises, one is a baby sulcata that i had for 1 year now and has grown 400+ grams! My other is a leopard weighing in around 150g. They live perfectly together and seems they couldn't live without each other. When you take one out of the tank the other one goes crazy looking for his buddy. I have them in a 55gallon setup, and of course the grew out of it. Picking up a 125gallon tomorrow. Here's my question to you guys, i have them on a heating bulb at night and a mercury vapor in daytime. This tank i'm getting tomorrow comes with a light that sits ontop that runs those long tubelike lights in it. Should i stick with the MVB or is there something that is equal to a MVB in tube lights world?

 

[JoshSloane]

It all depends on what the fixture is rated for. Really the only tube UVB bulbs that are worth your time would be the Reptisun 10.0 t5HO. This is a high UVB output bulb, but requires the t5 fixture. If the fixture can accommodate that bulb, then you should be fine. Otherwise going with a t8 or a non high output is really a waste of time in my opinion. Make sure you have a way to decrease a lot of ventilation on the cage so that you can regulate humidity ok.

 

[Yvonne G]

It's almost apples and oranges. The tube-type bulbs only provide UVB with very little to no heat, so you also need another fixture for a heat source. The Mercury Vapor bulb is heat and UVB all in one fixture.

 

[JoshSloane]

From my experiences I've found that separating the heat from the uvb is easier when fine tuning the habitat temps. If you dim a mvb you also dim the UVB coming from it in addition to the heat. Makes it harder to achieve correct specs