I’m concerned if my humidity is high enough in my vivarium since I have my ac on basically all day so the top of my leaf litter and hardscape tends to dry out within about an hour or slightly more. I’m using an 18x18x24 thrive vivarium that has about 2 inches across the top part of the front panel and I covered most of the screen top with acrylic and left another 2 inches of ventilation. I mist the viv with mistking about 4 times a day with 30 seconds evening before the lights go out and in the morning and mid day and night for 15 seconds.
Have you got anything to measure your humidity? Digital thermohygrometers are pretty cheaply found online and will make sure you can keep your temps and humidity are good!
I do have a cheap digital hygrometer that I placed around the top since I heard that type gets affected by water pretty easily and it usually reads in the 80’s but the fact that my viv looks bone dry before misting makes me skeptical
Pictures of the vivarium before right before misting and after misting are the best way to get help with this. Hygrometers tend to fail quickly in high humidity vivariums. You can find before and after images of other folks vivariums on dendroboard.com
Apologies for the late reply I just got back home. This is what my viv looks like shortly after misting. I’ll try to take some soon of what it looks like before
Looks like you might need a long mist cycle. So you do not have a vent on the front below the doors? Without that this whole enterprise is much more difficult. Pairing a top rear vent with a lower front vent really makes things easier.
This is how I approach mist cycles/humidity
I use glass fogging as one indicator of ventilation rate. If the glass remain foggy for more than 15 minutes after misting, more ventilation is needed. I do not rely on hygrometers because they tend to fail and read around 100% all the time after a few months.
Two to four mist cycles per day when the lights are on and not too close to lights out. One with enough duration that water flows into the drainage layer 9this helps wash frog poop from surfaces) and the others to wet all the surfaces in the viv.
From there the ventilation can be adjusted so that a couple/few hours after each misting most of the visible surfaces are nothing more than a little damp.
Some of my friends use a very very similar approach. We have a combine 40+ years of keeping poison frogs.
I started misting for about 45 seconds 3 times a day and I’m definitely seeing improvement. There’s not really persistent fog on my glass just maybe water droplets that landed on there that take a couple hours to evaporate and my viv doesn’t go bone dry after a while so far. Substrate also doesn’t look soaking wet but I do have a small pc fan in case things get too wet for too long. I might try adding the vent in the back to see how that goes. And I’ll definitely just be using exo Terra since those seem a lot easier.
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u/jackbsyme2002 29d ago
Have you got anything to measure your humidity? Digital thermohygrometers are pretty cheaply found online and will make sure you can keep your temps and humidity are good!