Winter/Humidity

[jcarlsen]

So, I'd planned on getting a chameleon sometime before the winter happened, but I'm glad I've postponed.

My girlfriend and I recently moved into a nice new apartment which includes heat in the rent. We can get it nice and warm in here, but the problem is that it's forced air heat and it dries out the place incredibly. I've got a large humidifier going where we'd want to put the chameleon enclosure, and our ambient humidity isn't really above 20 percent, according to a couple of hygrometers I've put in the area...

I know that the humidity in the enclosure would obviously be higher with an automatic mister and live plants, but I'm still kinda concerned that my apartment doesn't have a good base level humidity to begin with, even with a humidifier and covering a few sides of the enclosure.

I live in Boston and I'm using a large evaporative humidifier, if any of that info helps. Anybody from the northeast with some advice/info on this would be great.

 

[Carlton]

I know that the humidity in the enclosure would obviously be higher with an automatic mister and live plants, but I'm still kinda concerned that my apartment doesn't have a good base level humidity to begin with, even with a humidifier and covering a few sides of the enclosure.

I live in Boston and I'm using a large evaporative humidifier, if any of that info helps. Anybody from the northeast with some advice/info on this would be great.

This topic is discussed all the time on the forum (check the sub forum discussing enclosures), so I bet you'll find a lot of info using a search. But, basically, you won't have to humidify the entire room and wouldn't want to. At the humidity level a cham would be comfortable at a human would not be.

Many of us live in cool climates where we have to heat all winter, or need to use central AC in summer which also sucks the moisture out of the air. It can be done! Using a combination of lots of living plants in the cage (the more surfaces you have to catch and hold water the better and the plants transpire too), misting and even ultrasonic humidifiers (I happen to like these better than evaporative types as they produce fog that condenses on the cage surfaces), and covering the cage sides you can do it even in extremely dry situations. I kept higher humidity montane chams in bone dry CO in winter successfully (house humidity hovered around 15%). Some species will be easier to accommodate than others so that may play into your decision.

The main thing is, you are asking about this before you run into problems...you can experiment with a setup before bringing a cham home. The right approach!