Back in January 2020 I received my first tank from custom reptile habitats, and I loved
it.
Fast forward to August 2020 and we had the keys to our first house, and were designing
a reptile room.
That’s when myself and Paul from Custom Reptile Habitats decided we needed a wall
of leopard gecko tanks.
The room was designed around this idea.
By 2021 I had Gizmo’s tank, and now in 2022, we finally have Minnie and Maui’s tanks.
Not only that, but these will be part of my official Leopard Gecko starter kits, in collaboration
with Custom Reptile Habitats.
Hey guys and welcome back to my channel, where today I’ll be unboxing, building and finally
revealing my new official Leopard Gecko starter kits.
We have a variety of options to fit everyone's budget for a premium, high quality leopard
gecko enclosure.
If you want to see what the kits include as well as how to put them together, keep watching.
By the way we ended up making a makeshift building area slash studio in our garage,
as other than our bedroom and bathroom, every other room has an animal in, and we didn’t
want to disturb them with this build.
So we had to make a makeshift studio in the garage and we thought this remnant of carpet
would make it look as if we’re still in the house.
But yeah, it didn’t really work.
If you buy one of these kits you’ll get a few boxes, one will have the enclosure in,
one will have the decoration kit in, if you selected that option, and you may even have
one for the food.
When you first open the box you should see instructions, and everything is labelled which
makes putting these tanks together super easy.
So we started with the stand, spacer and hood, these all go together in a similar way.
So my tanks are on the floor, so I needed a stand, but if you have a rack, or table,
or desk, then you should be fine.
The spacer is needed if you want to stack your enclosures like I’m doing, and the
hood is optional, but it’s used to hide all the equipment, and personally I prefer
that look.
The only difference between putting together the hood, spacer and stand, is that the spacer
and stand come with this extra piece of PVC which needs to be stuck down, this just gives
extra support.
The kits do usually come with animal safe silicone, however I had already bought 3 tubes
of silicone sealant that I use with all my reptiles, so I just got a 3 pack off of amazon,
which I’ll list below for anyone interested.
Next up, let’s build the actual tanks.
I was going to do one at a time, but putting together the tanks is actually fairly straightforward.
The tanks consist of aluminium framework and PVC panels, so these just knock in and slip
into place.
But one tool you will need is a rubber mallet.
So both these tanks are suitable sizes for a leopard gecko, one is 3 x 2 x 2 ft, and
the other is 3 x 2 X 1.5ft.
If you’re wondering what size you should get your gecko, as I said, either are completely
fine, however in my experience the one that is only 1.5ft or 18” tall is easier to set
up because there’s not as much of a gap between the animal at basking and the lamps.
Whereas, if you’ve seen Diego’s build, you’ll know we had to build up the area
quite a bit in order to achieve the UV index and temperatures Diego required.
So it’s really all about what your plan is for the tank and how you’d like to decorate
it.
Anyway, back to the build, so once the back, bottom, top and sides are in the place, we
then add in these rubber pieces with this cool tool that comes with the kit.
We don’t want to add the front of the tank on at this point.
I do have a video where I go into detail about each step, so if you want to follow that whilst
putting together your tank, I’ll leave a link to that video below.
Once the rubber is in place, we want to go round the bottom with silicone, and up the
sides a bit.
Silicone is the bane of my life, and is probably my least favourite part of the build, but
if you want your tank to be watertight enough to be bioactive, then it’s best to do this
part.
Now for the backgrounds.
In Gizmo and Diego’s tank, we had a 3D background, then two flat sides that you could silicone
faux rocks on to.
This background option is available as part of
the kit, but we also have two others that I tried out today.
One of them did not go so well [clip].
We’ll get to that in a moment, but first let’s look at Maui’s background.
This consisted of 3 flat pieces that we cut ourselves, that were simply siliconed onto
the background and sides.
Once again, when dealing with silicone, things take time, we had to add one on, put a bunch
of weight on it, and leave it for a day.
So just doing these 3 sides, because we wanted to make sure it was properly stuck down, took
us 3 days.
The kits also come with these rock granules, which add natural colour, so we used this
and silicone to fill in the gaps where the background and sides met.
This takes a bit of practice to get right, but essentially you can throw the granules
on, or use a paint brush to add it.
What I will suggest is buying some cheap brushes because though the kit comes with one, once
that silicone is caught up in it, and dries, you either have to cut the bristles or throw
the thing away.
We then added on a variety of rock ledges that this kit comes with.
[CLIP]
There are other decorative rocks included in the kit, but these are to be placed around
the tank, rather than stuck to the side.
[Show clips of sticking rocks down]
[Play 2 clips explaining what I’m going to do]
Once everything was done, and the front of the tank was added, I went round the bottom
of the tank with a thick bead of silicone to ensure it was all nicely in place, water
tight and no insects, or dirt, or geckos would manage to get up, behind the background.
And that was Maui’s tank done, nice and simple.
The same can’t be said for Minnie’s.
So the tank itself went together absolutely fine, but it came with this 3-sided, amazing,
background, which I thought would simply slot in place, a dab of silicone and we’re good
to go.
But sadly we soon realised that the back of this background was not flat, and required
expanding foam, clips and a lot of manoeuvring to get in place.
So I did give Paul feedback on this and we agreed that this background won’t be included
in the kit, just yet, but once it has been improved and it can be fitted as easy as possible,
then it will be, as I really wanted this option to be for people who didn’t feel quite comfortable
building their own background, or maybe you just don’t have the time, and yeah this
was meant to be the easy option, but it didn’t go well.
I had a few meltdowns.
Eventually once the expanding foam held everything in place, we could add the front of the tank
on.
Like in Maui’s tank I added a bead of silicone around the bottom and up the sides.
I also went back with silicone and rock granules to cover up the corners where you could see
expanding foam and the few places that expanding foam dropped on and left marks.
When we were finally done, I added the extra piece of PVC on the bottom of both tanks just
like we did with the spacer and stand.
Once again, the kit does come with animal safe silicone, but since I had a tube open,
I went ahead and used my silicone sealant to hold these in place.
In total we used all three tubes of silicone as well as 2 cans of expanding foam.
Though I hope once we have fixed the three-sided background, installation will be far easier
and hopefully no expanding foam will be required - because that stuff is messy.
Then finally the tanks were complete and we could move them into the
reptile room.