truth for all.

tim2505

New Member
Hi everyone,
I am looking into the world of owning chameleons but doing lots of research first. I look on the forum and see all the positive things people post and also the negative.
I thought this thread would be good for all people thinking or wanting to get into owning/parenting chameleons. All the information about housing, lighting, feeding and nutrients is on this forum. But I see over and over again people getting it wron,g with what I think are problems because they have not researched.
What I think would be great would be for owners/parents of chameleons to write their experiences down.
Costs
Problems
Worries
etc
I think what I am trying to get at is to stop people who see a chameleon in a pet shop and go “WOW got to have one of those… “
Please help me getting this thread going. I have never owned a chameleon but I want to. Let’s get this thread going for all the new people and make them 100% aware of chameleon parenting,

I hope people will support this its not to offend anyone.

Tim.

Just want to do the right thing
 
This is a great Idea, I too haven't owned chameleons ... Yet. And could someone please give me a rough idea on how much all the heating and electricity costs monthly? Xx
 
This is a great Idea, I too haven't owned chameleons ... Yet. And could someone please give me a rough idea on how much all the heating and electricity costs monthly? Xx

thank you for the support. great question you have asked. I am sure all new people would like to know.
 
The basic problem here is that people who impulse buy a cham have not given it enough thought to find this forum BEFORE they buy. So, all this valuable experience sort of sits "wasted" until they decide to educate themselves. If they are cautious thoughtful keepers they find us right before or shortly after bringing their cham home, but more often they start searching for info once they get into trouble. We can post owner experiences on the web all we want, but until people start searching they won't see it.

Until there is some incentive for ALL pet shops to require this type of research before selling an animal there isn't much we can do...just keep our forums going so they are ready when buyers realize they need us.
 
Tim, I think your idea is good, but I'm not sure how much it will help--partly for the reasons Carlton has outlined.

It would be wonderful if more pet sellers told people about chameleonforums, so at least people would know where to look for the info---if they were interested in learning more.

I frequently see people criticizing those who have made impulse buys and relied upon the petstore employees for care advice.
Don't you expect the automobile dealer to give you correct information when you shop for a car?
Why are petstores considered blameless when IMHO people have every right to expect that someone who sells pets for their living should know exactly how to care for those pets?


This is a great Idea, I too haven't owned chameleons ... Yet. And could someone please give me a rough idea on how much all the heating and electricity costs monthly? Xx

Sarahlynne, unfortunately that is an impossible question to answer.

A person would have to know how much electricity costs for your area, how warm the house is normally kept in the area where the chameleon will be, what is used to heat your home (oil, coal, gas, electric), etc.

Chameleons aren't inexpensive to keep for a number of reasons and not all too many years ago, they were considered nearly impossible to keep alive for more than a few months.

They require live food, a calcium supplement, calcium with D3 supplement,a vitamin supplement and regular misting and/or a dripper--since they do not recognize standing water due to the fact that they drink off of leaves, plus they need certain humidity levels.
Unless you live in a climate where your cham can be kept outdoors, a UVB bulb and heat bulb are also needed.
They also have to have a certain humidity and temperature range, plants, vines and a good sized screen cage with drainage.
UVB bulbs are somewhat costly and need to be changed every 6 months.
Competent veterinary care for a reptile can be difficult to find and is not any cheaper than it is for other pets.
They are not like Bearded dragons, in that chameleons are most often very stressed by any handling--as opposed to beardies who will relax and allow themselves to be petted.

They are very cute pets but are definitely "high maintenance", require a bit of money to maintain and easily become ill if their exacting care requirements are not met.

This is not to discourage you but to let you know the realities of their care.
 
This is an awesome post Tim! You are 100% correct on somebody seeing a picture of one and thinking wow! I want one now! This actually happened to my boyfriend and I. We researched for 6 months before actually purchasing our panther, and we started talking to the guy we got him from in September (didn't actually get the cham until January) but we just wanted to make sure everything was perfect for him and make sure we were ready. A friend of ours saw a pic of our beautiful boy and decided he wanted to buy one for his 5 year old because they are so "cool". I flipped! I told him first of all how much just the chameleon costs, not to mention the entire set up, food, and vet bills. (which quickly changed his mind). Chameleons are like children in my eyes. They can't fend for themselves. They rely on us for everything. People think chams are so much easier than a dog because they are so small, but realistically, dogs are much easier! LOL. The best advice I can give anybody looking into getting one for the first time is DO YOUR RESEARCH! Ask thousands of questions if you have to. You will feel like you know everything until you get your precious little lizard, and reality will hit that you don't know what to do. It was the best decision we made to get ours, but the better decision was educating ourselves :)
 
Tim, I think your idea is good, but I'm not sure how much it will help--partly for the reasons Carlton has outlined.

It would be wonderful if more pet sellers told people about chameleonforums, so at least people would know where to look for the info---if they were interested in learning more.

I frequently see people criticizing those who have made impulse buys and relied upon the petstore employees for care advice.
Don't you expect the automobile dealer to give you correct information when you shop for a car?
Why are petstores considered blameless when IMHO people have every right to expect that someone who sells pets for their living should know exactly how to care for those pets?




Sarahlynne, unfortunately that is an impossible question to answer.

A person would have to know how much electricity costs for your area, how warm the house is normally kept in the area where the chameleon will be, what is used to heat your home (oil, coal, gas, electric), etc.

Chameleons aren't inexpensive to keep for a number of reasons and not all too many years ago, they were considered nearly impossible to keep alive for more than a few months.

They require live food, a calcium supplement, calcium with D3 supplement,a vitamin supplement and regular misting and/or a dripper--since they do not recognize standing water due to the fact that they drink off of leaves, plus they need certain humidity levels.
Unless you live in a climate where your cham can be kept outdoors, a UVB bulb and heat bulb are also needed.
They also have to have a certain humidity and temperature range, plants, vines and a good sized screen cage with drainage.
UVB bulbs are somewhat costly and need to be changed every 6 months.
Competent veterinary care for a reptile can be difficult to find and is not any cheaper than it is for other pets.
They are not like Bearded dragons, in that chameleons are most often very stressed by any handling--as opposed to beardies who will relax and allow themselves to be petted.

They are very cute pets but are definitely "high maintenance", require a bit of money to maintain and easily become ill if their exacting care requirements are not met.

This is not to discourage you but to let you know the realities of their care.

Thanks I see what you mean xx
 
This is a great Idea, I too haven't owned chameleons ... Yet. And could someone please give me a rough idea on how much all the heating and electricity costs monthly? Xx


At a very rough idea my electricity bill has doubled since I got fred but after the initial set up of the cage and all the keeping is not very expensive I spend 10 euro a week on feeders and gutload with food I'm eating myself supplements last a long time and uv every 6 months
 
I run a chameleon blog that I link for people all the time, since it saves me typing out everything all the time, but one of the blogs that gets the highest amount of traffic monthly is this one: Average Cost of Owning a Chameleon, where I listed the essentials you need when keeping a chameleon, what they cost, where you can get them for less (sometimes), and how much it costs to maintain everything. And a good 50% of the time or more, people find my blog by Googling something like "how much do chameleons cost to keep?" or "what does it take to own a chameleon?" So SOME people are thankfully looking ahead at what it takes and then perhaps, once they see the costs involved (not just even the effort, the costs) change their minds and get a leopard gecko instead.

I think if more people knew the costs and time required to take care of chameleons properly they would change their minds. Or get into it more carefully. Because they're definitely not for everyone, and I think people who are more detail-oriented and thorough tend to do better with them than people who don't like being super involved.

And I completely agree with Lovereps, it's a shame that you can't trust most pet store employees but feel that there's no reason not to. We should be able to trust them and know that we're getting good information and it's a shame that we can't. Store owners should be doing more to educate their employees, because it's really not all that difficult.
 
This is a great Idea, I too haven't owned chameleons ... Yet. And could someone please give me a rough idea on how much all the heating and electricity costs monthly? Xx


Well figured I would help answer a some of the questions, Once you get past the initial very large investment (which could easily be $750-1,000 if talking about a panther chameleon) once you factor in getting the cage ($100), proper lighting hardware and bulbs ($150), vines / plants ($50), misting system($120-160), and of course chameleon ($200-600).

But just purely maintenance costs you’re looking at the following,
Electric (assuming you have live plants, and want to run both a uvb and 6500k bulb each of them will run about 50 watts give or take) so roughly 100 watts in T5 florescent bulbs. Then another 75-100 watt basking bulb you’re looking at 175-200 watts per hour on lighting. Multiply that out by 12-14 hours a day of “lights on time”, you’re looking at a total day consumption of about 2.1-2.8kw… times that by 30 days, your monthly power usage on one chameleon will be about 60-90kw… multiply that out by your electricity price and you will get your “added electric bill” per chameleon enclosure. Most people pay in the 9-15 cents per hour range per kw which would leave a large range of $6-14 increase on your electric bill to run the lights for your chameleon. (With multiple variables coming into play lol) but just trying to guestimate here.

Then you have the cost of replacing your uvb bulbs every 6-9 months which go from $20-50 a bulb depending on your brand and size… so another $3-6 dollars per month in “replacement bulbs” (basking lights can be had for a few bucks only using house lights and not expensive reptile lights so I won’t even include those)

Then you have supplements, for those most part those are pretty inexpensive, each container of vitamins or calcium will last a very long time depending on your quantity of reptiles, it could be well over a year. So it’s a minimal cost, but you have to figure $30-40 in supplements a year, or $3-4 a month.

Then you have feeders, this is the major wild card. If you are comfortable with breeding and raising your own bugs and feeders, you can cut the cost of bugs to literally next to nothing by gut loading them and feeding them with things grown in your garden. But if you purchase your bugs, it’s all dependent on the quantity of bug, type of bugs, where you’re getting your bugs etc. So monthly food costs for 1 chameleon could easily be as low as only a few dollars (for breeding and raising your own colonies of bugs, as well as gut loading and feeding them with home grown fruits and veggies) to as large as $60+ if buying all your bugs online, in small quantities, and paying shipping (instead of large quantities and taking care of them on your own)

So you can easily see, there are a ton of variables in “what will owning a chameleon cost per month” but just on a few things listed above you can see it can cost anywhere between $20-85 a month per chameleon. But that is also excluding the very important item of “vets” and emergency vet bills…. Likewise, if you have multiple chameleons, you can get 1 large uvb and 6500k bulbs to go across both enclosures, etc and be able to cut costs minor that way, but that just goes back to the original point of there are tons of variables that factor in their monthly costs.

Hope that helps a little :)
 
I agree with what your doing. At an expo on Saturday I stopped a mom dad and little kid from getting a veiled after I told them about all the different feeders. Good thing because they had done no research, they just saw it and wanted it. I could tell because they were gonna ask the seller how I take care of them and he would just encourage them to buy if anything!
 
I don't think the cost is that much the most expensive thing your going to buy is your Cham caging you can get for 80 or make yourself if u but I never thought about the money I enjoy them they are like my kids to me lighting would run about 40 u can find cheap way to make your cages look good and the chams love them I use a plastic cup with a hole in it for the dripper. If I ever had to take mine to the vet it's not expensive about 30-40 dollars. I guess it just depends on your love for them and time
 
I enjoy them and love making homes for them. Even after all th research ive done before hand i always find things i dont know and have to ask thats why i love this site its VERY helpful.
 
i feel like you need factor in 1 vet visit...
xray, calcium bloodwork, fecal and the exam itself...

my first cham vet was $300 approximately
 
Awesome post tim i agree completely. you know sometimes when i go shopping for lights and what not at the pet store people walk by, the chameleons are right next to the lights by the way, and they say ooh why dont we get one of those. so me being right there i say hey im going to get a chameleon soon if your looking into them i could tell you a few things (ive done way too much research :rolleyes: ) so they might start asking me some questions and ill give them the hard truth about the money and expensive supplies and large amount of care that goes into owning a chameleon. after that they start to walk away knowing they couldnt handle all of that. then i take a look at the chameleons and think what wouldve happened to you if i werent here when they walked by little guy.
 
I don't think it's smart to assume a pet store employee knows anything. Usually some good hearted kid making 7$ an hour is the best we get. Maybe 30-40 yrs ago when small stores loved what they did and cared but wal-mart beat that out of us. I don't buy anything without researching it first, I usually know more than the seller by the time I'm ready to buy. Anyway I have a heated garage with 15 set ups 2 lights each and I did not notice much change in electricity 15$ maybe. Feeders 26$/1000 crickets, 40$/500 small dubia. I don't know if I want to think about this anymore....this hurts too much. It's not cheap. My vet charges 60$ just to walk through the door plus fecal, meds, easily add up to 150-200$. My vet is cheap comparatively speaking.
 
wow. thank you all so much for posting on this thread. the main reason I started it is because I want to get my first chameleon and want the truth about keeping them. its not just the cost that i wanted to know but everything else that can cause worry (or as i put it the downsides). please keep posting on this thread as i think it would help alot of people out.

cheers.

Tim
 
it doesnt have to cost 750-1000 if you are a smart consumer.

Always check craigslist and ebay for deals. If you could find someones whole used set up you'll get the best deal.

panther chameleon 3-6 month old 175-275.
cage 20-60$
uvb 5.0- 20$
uvb fixture, any hood fixture works even fish tank ones. 10-20$
Clamp light fixture 5$ at home depot or menards
50-100W house bulb 3$ for a 4 pack. heats just like the expensive pet store ones.
spray bottle from the dollar store for misting. You can get a misting system but chams dont require it.
dripper-5$ or just poke a needle into a cup or container.
foilage- go to any hobby store or Michaels 5$ bamboo stick bundles and 5-10$ bundle of vines/leaves.
10$ vitamins

Its the cricket prices and buying everything at retail cost that will get you dishing out alot more.
So you could essentially get everything together for under 300$ if you find the right deals. they are out there. This is based off all the chams i own and have bought so far and I own 7 adults. Having 2 lights on one cage for 10 hours a day wont kill your pocket.



Well figured I would help answer a some of the questions, Once you get past the initial very large investment (which could easily be $750-1,000 if talking about a panther chameleon) once you factor in getting the cage ($100), proper lighting hardware and bulbs ($150), vines / plants ($50), misting system($120-160), and of course chameleon ($200-600).

But just purely maintenance costs you’re looking at the following,
Electric (assuming you have live plants, and want to run both a uvb and 6500k bulb each of them will run about 50 watts give or take) so roughly 100 watts in T5 florescent bulbs. Then another 75-100 watt basking bulb you’re looking at 175-200 watts per hour on lighting. Multiply that out by 12-14 hours a day of “lights on time”, you’re looking at a total day consumption of about 2.1-2.8kw… times that by 30 days, your monthly power usage on one chameleon will be about 60-90kw… multiply that out by your electricity price and you will get your “added electric bill” per chameleon enclosure. Most people pay in the 9-15 cents per hour range per kw which would leave a large range of $6-14 increase on your electric bill to run the lights for your chameleon. (With multiple variables coming into play lol) but just trying to guestimate here.

Then you have the cost of replacing your uvb bulbs every 6-9 months which go from $20-50 a bulb depending on your brand and size… so another $3-6 dollars per month in “replacement bulbs” (basking lights can be had for a few bucks only using house lights and not expensive reptile lights so I won’t even include those)

Then you have supplements, for those most part those are pretty inexpensive, each container of vitamins or calcium will last a very long time depending on your quantity of reptiles, it could be well over a year. So it’s a minimal cost, but you have to figure $30-40 in supplements a year, or $3-4 a month.

Then you have feeders, this is the major wild card. If you are comfortable with breeding and raising your own bugs and feeders, you can cut the cost of bugs to literally next to nothing by gut loading them and feeding them with things grown in your garden. But if you purchase your bugs, it’s all dependent on the quantity of bug, type of bugs, where you’re getting your bugs etc. So monthly food costs for 1 chameleon could easily be as low as only a few dollars (for breeding and raising your own colonies of bugs, as well as gut loading and feeding them with home grown fruits and veggies) to as large as $60+ if buying all your bugs online, in small quantities, and paying shipping (instead of large quantities and taking care of them on your own)

So you can easily see, there are a ton of variables in “what will owning a chameleon cost per month” but just on a few things listed above you can see it can cost anywhere between $20-85 a month per chameleon. But that is also excluding the very important item of “vets” and emergency vet bills…. Likewise, if you have multiple chameleons, you can get 1 large uvb and 6500k bulbs to go across both enclosures, etc and be able to cut costs minor that way, but that just goes back to the original point of there are tons of variables that factor in their monthly costs.

Hope that helps a little :)
 
I agree that you could set up a chameleon for $200-300 if you know where to look, even brand new items. That's without any "upgrades" like a misting system or the better UVB bulbs and fixtures, but it's enough to keep a chameleon healthy and happy. But even so it's still a lot more than setting up a ball python or a leopard gecko, and it's definitely a shock to people looking into it who don't tally things up before hand.

The monthly maintenance cost can vary quite a bit, depending on your feeders, your gutloading, etc. But tricks like growing your own veggies for gutloading and breeding your own bugs are also great money-savers. Also, do yourself a favor and don't spend any money on fake vines or branches - just grab some nice branches from outside an not only will you not spend a dollar but they'll be sturdier, natural, and chameleons seem to like them more than the bendivines or whatnot.

As far as any downsides, I wish someone would have told me when I started that managing all that spray water was going to be an issue. After a while I have drainage down to a science, and don't ruin my rented apartment carpets but those first couple months were a disaster. No one says anything along the lines of "Mist your chameleon at least a minute or more 4-5 times a day... and oh, all that water? Good luck figuring out what to do with it." I definitely recommend to new keepers that they have a plan to deal with it (even if it's just a Shamwow under the cage) before they get their chameleon, because ruining a nice table or your carpet is not fun.
 
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