Hermit Crab room

[TabbiDawn]

I'm wondering if anyone here has a room dedicated to their Hermies, rather than keeping them in a tank... I live in South Florida, Hot and Humid, and My house has a very large screened in porch, concrete floors, a six inch concrete drop from bottom of door to floor and a two foot tall metal wall between floor and screen windows, I was contemplating turning this into my hermit room, putting down substrate 6 inches deep with a gradual slope to about 11 inches against the wall, stepping stones to clearly mark walking zone from door to door, rocks and fake plants for climbing, and hanging heat source for cooler nights and winter... Any ideas or input? My biggest worries are fruit flies as we don't have children or pets that would pose a potential threat, price and upkeep are not really issues as I'm prepared for daily spot cleaning when I change water and food, and frequent shoveling out of substrate and hermit collecting and counting before substrate changing. Even contemplating a misting system if humidity proves to be an issue.

[Crabber85]

@TabbiDawn, I don't think anybody here has done a hermitcrab room its been a dream for a lot of us to one day be able to do this but I haven't heard from any of our members yet that they have actually gone ahead and done it.I want to do something very similar one day hopefully but with the cost of materials rising the end point cost is getting steeper and steeper for me, the last time I checked it was going to run me about $2000.00 just for the heating elements, substrate, room humidifying unit, plywood and pond liner(its a rubber paint that is regularly used to build fresh water aquariums out of ply wood sheets and two-by-fours so it is completely safe once properly dried and cured and makes the treated surface water proof), the pond liner is something like $25 a gallon and for the room size I want to do I'd need roughly a hundred gallons of the stuff so it isn't cheap by any stretch of the imagination.lolOne thing I noticed was that you state there is a sheet of metal where the substrate would be, while hermitcrabs are not sensitive to all metals caution still has to be taken when dealing with metals around hermitcrabs as a lot of metal manufacturers like to coat their product with chromium to make the metal rust and stain proofed and chromium aka chrome is seriously toxic to hermitcrabs and tends to leach from the metal it has been applied to when a certain amount of heat is used which is why cooking with stainless steel pots and pans is a big issue because these pots and pans have been dipped or coated in chromium they are considered highly carcinogenic to the state of California because they off gas some of the chromium as your cooking your food and leech a lot of it into the food as its being prepared.I think if you could keep the temp and humidity regulated and keep the substrate clean the crabs should be safe though I wouldn't allow foot traffic from outside the house to pass through the room as you risk introducing so many contaminants into the substrate this way including chemicals like pesticides that to my mind its just too much of a risk.Allowing shoes to be worn into the room that have previously been outside without being cleaned first even if coming from inside the house will still present a contamination risk, if memory serves the last time this idea was brought up we were going to try it like a beach no socks, no shoes to reduce the risk of contaminants finding their way into the room.

[jenok]

You should probabaly get an extra humidity and temp gauge to put in the room and do several readings a day for several weeks to see if the humidity and temp are going to be anywhere close to steady and acceptable. And like crabber said you would have to make sure that no contaminates from shoes, socks, pants or even skin were brought in to the room. Hospital shoe covers may or may not work? And the steping stone thing would be a must have but you would have to make sure they couldn't somehow get underneath them.