Tortoise enclosure

[Hhollylouise]

Hello everyone I need some advice , I’ve had my Hermann tortoise 2 years now , I currently live in a flat hoping to buy a house next year so this will be temporary as when we buy she will have a built in indoor and outdoor enclosure , I’m looking into converting my spare room into a enclosure just for her , well half of it , my idea is to section of the room and lay a soft vinyl down so it’s padded and protecting the carpet as I do not own this flat and use a 3ft by 3ft box with soil in and her lights etc and leave the rest of the area without subrate and leave it a open space , the whole area would be around 8ft by 6ft would it be bad for her to have no substrate in the other areas ?

 

[Littleredfootbigredheart]

Hello and welcome!

It’s definitely a nice idea for her to have her own room! But it does need to mimic her environmental needs throughout, ie substrate, appropriately heated(an oil heater would help in the room), but there’s definitely a way to make that kind of thing work, my thinking is something kind of like the photo below, I wouldn’t use any kind of top soil though, unless composted yourself it’s impossible to know what kind of plants have gone into it, could be something toxic, with reptisoils, they tend to have sand mixed in which also isn’t good for them.

I’m thinking if you could build some sort of barrier like this, and then line the whole thing with pond liner(Amazon sell them pretty cheap for good sizes) then adhere it to the wall slighting so no substrate can get underneath. Then I’d build yourself a stand that has your basking light and tube uv mounted closely together in one area, make sure your basking spot is reaching the desired 95-100f directly underneath, then to heat the rest of the area you could have some wooden timber running over the top with some CHEs mounted, and an oil heater in the room would help ambient heat

The only potential problem is with it being in the ground, temperature obviously rises, so a raised 8 foot table might work better.

Perhaps you’ll find this thread I made below useful to go over, I cover correct equipment(lighting, heating, uv), it’s very easy to have the wrong bulb types, so definitely use it to double check!, I go over levels, sizing, appropriately maintaining humidity, there’s lots of visual examples for everything and a really handy diet link to check out, hopefully it’ll help inspire some ideas for the kind of set up you could build in the room.

Housing adult Russian and Hermans indoors

Hello there! In this thread I’m going to include some information an example of an appropriate indoor set up for an older Herman/russian. As much as it’s encouraged to have tortoises in a safe outdoor enclosure, I understand being from the uk myself, that some climates make it difficult to...

tortoiseforum.org

This one can also be really good to go over, it’ll help you avoid the wrong bulbs, substrates, housing etc, you can also always double check purchases on the forum before buying!

Common keeping errors

Hello everyone! I’d been a long time lurker on this site long before joining just under a year ago now, over that time I’ve seen these husbandry issues come up time and time again, sometimes with dire consequences☹️ I thought this thread might serve as a good visual guide for these common...

tortoiseforum.org

Hope this helps! Always happy to answer any further questions too!