The plastic for the naturalistic backgrounds was ready yesterday and it has been picked up. I also recently placed the order for the misting system from mistking.com. I spoke with the owner, Marty, who is well known in the poison dart frog community about the setup. It turned out to be a little more complicated than I thought but not by much. He also suggested adding a drain to each of the 3 sections which I felt was a good idea, so I will pick up a 1.5" hole saw and add those.

Here is a simple diagram of how the misting system will most likely be set up. I am waiting from a confirmation from Marty, but regardless it will be similar to this.

The misting setup arrived on Friday and I installed it the same day. As mentioned above, I purchased it from mistking.com, a very helpful and well known Canadian vendor with a good reputation. I can say that their customer service is great. Marty, the owner and (possibly?) only person working there was very quick to respond to all of my questions, writing me back sometimes within minutes, even after 10pm on weekends. He is certainly tied into his email.

Anyway, Marty was able to advise me a bit on this since it is my first misting system. I had used automatic foggers before but this setup is on an entirely different level.  The only thing I added in to my order after talking to him was drains for each section. I hadn't even thought about drains on tanks before, but as soon as he asked it made perfect sense. There were times, especially when I had mantellas and Uroplatus Phantasticus, that I could over water their natural vivarium and get it flooded, nasty, and need a tear down to clean it out. This should prevent that from happening.

Marty did suggest I get 1 drain for each partition rather than 1 per level, but I decided against this. His reasoning was that having a common drain per section would facilitate easier bacteria exchange. While that is certainly true, I don't think extra drains for this particular setup would solve that issue. The partitions are really only physical barriers for the geckos. Adding in extra drains wouldn't stop water from flowing under the partitions. The only way I could prevent this would be to weld the bottom part of each partition to the tank, and even that might not do it. Since I didn't want to turn these sections into a permanent fixture, forever limiting the size of the tanks in each level of Gecko Condo, I just decided to be even more diligent about checking animal health and going with 1 common drain per section.  As a note to anyone else who wants to do this, with any natural vivarium you need to be really careful with animal health. If you bring an animal in without quarantining them you could ruin the entire thing by infecting the vivarium with nematodes or coccidia. Cleaning out a basic cage with paper towel is pretty easy, but having to disinfect and clean an entire vivarium in that circumstance is a much bigger ordeal. You should always be quarantining your animals when you get them and checking their health, but this is just an extra reminder to stay on top of it.

I have not run the set up yet, but everything is installed. It starts in the bottom storage area where I have the pump mounted on the rear wall. There is an 8 gallon reservoir to right of the pump. On the left there is a 4 gallon container to collect drain run-off. Water gets pulled in from reservoir and goes through the pump and out the left side of the base. It goes through all the nozzles and then comes back in through the right side of the base where it connects to the ZipDrip device that pressurize the lines so the nozzles don't drip constantly when not in use.



Here is a back shot of most of the rear of the condo as it stands. You can see the drains and their channels to the back, as well as some of the misting set ups. Not pictured (because I haven't done it yet) is a small section to hang two power strips. One for 6 lights and the other for two timers. One timer is for the lights, and the other is for the misting system. Mistking has a really nice timer that comes with their kits specifically for the misting systems. It has a battery backup and can record up to 8 events and trigger them on a per-second basis. I am not aware of any other timer of this type that can do things on a per-second basis like this.



Here is just another shot of the back. It is a little more leveled off so you can get a better idea of the nozzle arrangement.



Getting close to done! I have been working on the backgrounds and all of them have been foamed. I need to trim them and put caulk and coir on them and then those are finished. The only thing left after that before I can put geckos in is planting. I put an order for plants in today, so hopefully by the end of next weekend this will be more or less complete.