(upbeat music)
- Good morning everybody and welcome to the vlog
in day, I don't know, six, seven, whatever, it's all a blur,
of the reptarium expansion.
It's coming together good.
You guys can kind of see, we got so much stuff going on.
Again, the little details are
what's gonna really make this pop.
Gotta work on the gift shop here in the next few days too,
so it's pretty exciting.
The big job for today is actually this iguana cage.
Obviously Diddy and Dixie, the rhino iguanas,
are gonna go in there.
I have some issues with that.
I'll share with you guys in a few minutes,
but for now I'm actually gonna
take a little break from the build
because I noticed that Lucy gave me a little present.
Well, my girl Lucy definitely wanted me to take a break
from building the new expansion,
because she's got a little bit of poop soup over here.
So I guess we're gonna have to go in there
and get her cleaned up.
I'll be honest with you, it's a nice break.
I never thought I'd look forward to cleaning poop soup,
but I kinda am looking forward to getting in,
but she's in a kind of precarious spot,
so hopefully she's not hungry.
(upbeat music)
I'm coming to hang out with you okay?
Can you leave me alone for a minute?
(screams)
It's stinky.
Mom's homemade beef stew!
No, mom didn't cook beef stew like this,
I could promise you that.
- [Cameraman] Watch your back.
Watch your back.
- [Host] We're all right.
Look, look, look, look.
Don't wanna get bit.
Lucy.
Lucy, it's okay baby.
Hey, hey, hey, Lucy!
Stop it.
What are you doing?
Always makes a little more entertainment
when Lucy is not in a good mood.
Look at her, look at her!
Lucy, come on!
Stop it, stop it.
Please, go back over there.
Go back over there.
Go, go.
Come on.
Come on, get over there.
Woo, Lucy, come on.
Oh great, great.
Just where I want you to be.
(intense music)
Boy I tell you what,
she is in a bad mood today.
She's been pretty good this last few months,
but obviously today she decided
she didn't want to be my friend anymore.
It's okay though, we'll get her.
You stay right there, okay?
We're friends.
(intense rock music)
(vacuum whirring)
(intense rock music)
All in a day's work, you know what I mean?
It can be a perilous job,
but she's just in a real bad cantankerous mood today.
So we just got to fill her up,
she's all cleaned up and we're good to go.
So Lucy, you'll be all right buddy,
we'll be friends tomorrow.
So obviously it doesn't take a brain surgeon
to realize that this is the front window,
and of course outside is cold.
Now we knew we were going to deal with this
with the rhino iguana cage
but we sealed it really well so there's no air drafts,
but there's still cold out here.
So basically, I'm gonna just shoot this here.
We're at 75 degrees right here.
Actually, about 82 on this side which is really good.
Now again, the sun is coming up over here,
so it beats in the window, warms up a little bit.
At night it's dropping down to low 70's,
so obviously we have to somehow heat this cage
to keep the iguanas healthy and happy, right?
Well originally, we built it to where
there'd be lights above these screens right up here.
Now there's not a lot of room in there,
and the truth is with normal heat bulbs,
I knew it was gonna get warm,
but I was a little concerned about,
potential fire hazards and stuff like that.
But the fact is that I think I'm gonna need
mercury vapor bulbs in here to really heat this up.
They're a lot higher output.
They can actually push heat down way up there.
They're made really for large enclosures,
but I don't want to put them up in the ceiling,
because that would definitely be a fire hazard.
I'm gonna have to hang some lights in the cage,
which is completely fine,
and then somehow get the wires above here.
Just kinda trying to sort this thing out.
It's gonna look completely fine.
But always my first thoughts are
how to keep the animals happy
before even the aesthetics of the cage.
I'm gonna hang a couple lights up in there.
I don't have mercury vapor bulbs,
so I'll just have some heat lamps for now,
and then here in the next few days get the mercury vapor
and then we can really mess with it.
And the truth is, even with large cages,
like Heidi's cage, or these guys,
I may have to go with some mercury vapor
because again, by the time you get
all the way from here, all the way down to here,
that heat can actually dissipate.
Now, Ivy's cage is really good,
but when you have a seven-foot span from here to here,
where like the albino iguanas are gonna go,
I'm gonna have to make sure that this light
can penetrate all the way down to the branches,
where they're gonna be at.
If that doesn't work we can use mercury vapor bulbs,
and we can do it here because we have plenty of room up top.
In the iguana cage they'd be sealed in,
it'd be way too dangerous.
So let's go ahead and just jump in
and get this problem hopefully solved.
(upbeat music)
The problem is, is that I have
literally this little space here.
I've gotta reach my hand in here to plug the actual plug in
to this outlet that is on a timer,
so, I mean literally the biggest issue here
is just the matter of the fact that
I have no space to get to it.
The good news is, once it's plugged in
I can change bulbs without having to go this way.
It'll be pretty easy,
but the actual plugging part's the hard part
because I literally can't see the plug,
so I have to just go in there with my arm
and feel around and hopefully get into the hole.
Definitely not the best way.
Could've used two more inches and I would've been fine.
- That's what she said.
(upbeat music)
- Okay so that was definitely a challenge.
I'll probably secure those cords a little bit better,
foam up that hole.
Gonna just have to pay attention.
Again, what we'll probably do is
a mercury vapor bulb in both of these,
really push that heat down,
so that it's 95 on the hot spots,
maybe even a little bit higher 90's.
And then hopefully they can get down here
and be in the low 80's,
that way they got a good temperature gradient.
So, that was a tough one I'm not gonna lie to you.
That was way harder than I expected it to be,
but I think it's gonna work out great.
(upbeat music)
Just like I showed you with the iguana cage,
obviously we have those heat bulbs, we have UV light,
in that case we're gonna have mercury vapor like I said.
Mercury vapor not only pushes a lot of heat,
it also pushes UVA and UVB,
but we also have heat pads.
Those big hog pads, you know I showed you
as I was installing these things.
They're like a fiber glass heating pad
that can actually go in mud,
they're made for pigs and stuff like that.
But those need to go on thermostats of course.
Now I'm using vivarium systems.
I'm good friends with Rich over at Reptile Basics,
so I used his brand, it's really good.
I mean there's a few other ones out there,
but I like the vivarium electronics, personally.
I think they work really well,
super easy to set up.
So basically all we're gonna do,
is we're gonna have obviously this plug here
that goes into the actual outlet, power outlet.
Now the heating pad goes right into this right here.
Super simple, and then the probe itself,
which is already hooked up,
just plugs into there and then you just set the time,
so I mean, it's that simple,
really easy, so let's just go ahead and set it up.
And again I mean, literally it's as easy as this,
you just plug this in right here.
My probe is right here,
goes into this first slot right here like that.
Now I just have to plug the actual vivarium unit in,
and set the temperature.
In this case I want it to be
about 95 degrees on the hot spot.
That way he has a place to go
and have really good belly heat
as well as basking heat as well.
So, plug this in and we are good to go.
(upbeat music)
And again you just go through the dials right here
to set your actual temperature.
You've got plus and minus, all that stuff.
You can enter nighttime temperatures.
Right now the probe is reading 73 degrees.
We're gonna set it at 80 degrees,
so we're gonna bump it up to like 95 degrees,
and this will take maybe about an hour to get up to size,
and then he's going to have belly heat.
Gonna take all these water dishes,
which are so cool, I love these things.
There's of course a couple different sizes,
a big one, a few different colors,
and then some small stuff.
So I'm just gonna kinda set them
and get a feel for where they all go,
makes sense and stuff like that.
It's all part of the process, right?
So once the water dishes are in,
then I can start to worry about foliage
here in the next few days,
and then ultimately put animals in it.
(upbeat music)
Al Machino is settling in so nicely,
I mean he's been all over these branches.
Every time I came over last night
and then early this morning,
he's just like cruising around.
He's settled right on a branch right now,
and it just warms my heart,
and you guys know that bringing animals over
is what I'm super excited about.
So I think at least once a day,
even if we're not ready for the whole zoo to be open,
I'm gonna bring something over,
just to kinda get that, you know, it's just so exciting.
I've got the perfect animal in mind,
and that animal of course, is Marshmallow,
the ivory Burmese python.
You know, there's so many animals
that I was excited about getting over
to the new reptarium expansion,
but this animal is just super cool, it's super nice.
You guys know that we have Sunrise over there,
we have Jeffrey over there,
and people love him
but a kind of white,
I mean it's little off-white obviously,
it's not pure-white,
but an ivory berm is gonna be
a really cool edition.
And again, it's that kind of smaller python,
that's gonna one day get really big.
But kids can handle this one,
Jeffrey's getting a little bit larger, which is awesome,
and of course Sunrise is large too.
Let's go ahead and take Marshmallow over there
and put him in his new enclosure.
And this is the part I absolutely love,
is just letting it go and explore.
Of course we'll put some plants
and some other decorations in here,
but for now we're just gonna
go ahead and get him in here set-up,
and much like Al,
just let him crawl around a little bit
and see where he's gonna end up going,
see if he likes the ledges and the rocks,
and kinda settling in.
I'm sure it's gonna take him a while.
I always enjoy that, you know,
that mental enrichment that they get into a new enclosure,
they start smelling all the different things,
they see the ledges.
I mean, it's awesome so,
again, I'm just gonna sit here
and watch my boy, Marshmallow.
(upbeat music)
It's been a handful of hours,
I just wanna get an idea
of what the temperature change is in here.
Already you see we're up to 85 degrees over here.
We were down in the upper 70's before.
Over here, we're at 91 degrees,
so that hotspot is 91 degrees.
I wanna get that up again to about 95,
but you can see a massive difference,
even the lower cage is 82 degrees right here.
Just installing these lights alone,
bumped the temperature a good five to seven degrees,
with a hotspot jump at about 10 degrees.
If we get mercury vapors,
it's really gonna push that heat all the way down
and it's gonna work out perfect,
so yeah, mission accomplished.
This was certainly the enclosure,
of course, Ivy the anaconda's enclosure,
I was probably the most excited about,
because I knew this would be the centerpiece
when people walked in and just kinda blown away.
So, it's even more incredible and larger
than I could even have ever imagined to be honest with you.
Obviously, we've got to give some time
for the water to cycle through,
get all the chemicals out.
We need to go through a bacteria plume with our biofilter.
So it's probably going to be a week or so
before Ivy can actually get in here.
Not to mention we want the water warm up too.
It's getting there, it's all getting there
and again we'll get some foliage,
some plants kinda hanging out,
draping from the ceiling and stuff like that,
so it feels kinda amazonian in here.
But, wow I tell you what, this is incredible.
I think Noah's gonna have some fun
with the 24 hour challenge in here for sure.
(upbeat music)
So Marshmallow's settling in,
you know, they're not like reticks
where they crawl around like crazy and stuff like that.
They're definitely a more ground-dwelling animal,
but still really cool to see him in here
and he looks just absolutely beautiful,
and since we put him in here,
he's been kinda cruising around,
tongue flicking, so that's really good,
again, mental enrichment, loving it.
It looks amazing, one more animal.
I just want to keep putting animals in now.
Now I'm addicted to it.
I'm definitely enjoying all of this build man,
it's like dreams come true.
This is my personal playground,
you know what I mean?
I'm absolutely loving it,
it's coming together well.
Thank you guys for joining me on the journey,
and I thank you for watching today's video.
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Thanks again.
Have a wonderful day.
Be kind to someone,
and I promise I'll see you guys tomorrow.