Cheap $100 Leopard Gecko Setup Tutorial !

This is a leopard gecko. And set ups can get kind of expensive. Not everyone has the ability to spend $400 on a set up. So today I'm gonna take you on a journey to get a set up on a budget. I have $100 to make this happen. Where are we going Mr. Brian? I told you guys we're building a leopard gecko enclosure on a budget. Oh. First thing we have to start with is lighting. Lighting is so important with any animal but you have to understand that leopard geckos need about a 90 to 95 degree hot spot. So you're gonna need a light that heats that enclosure on one side to 95. The other side should maybe be 80, 82. That way they have what they call a heat gradient. And then when it comes to UVB, some people say that leopard geckos don't need UVB because they are nocturnal. They don't go out in the sunlight. But I think when you're setting a set up you might as well have a heat lamp that's gonna keep it about 90, 92 degrees. On the hot side, on the cool side about 80, 82 degrees. You might as well have UVB because it's not gonna hurt the animal. It's only gonna help. And that kind of helps with metabolizing, especially vitamin D. And you don't get metabolic bone disease. So you want a combo like this that has a basking light and a UVB light. Now this says it's $50 here. I went on the Pets March website and actually saw that this was under $30. And what you could do is you could take this up to the cashier, show them that. They'll actually price match this from $50 down to 30. Just here. Okay, so keep that up. Can I go look at the cats? I'm gonna go look at the cats. I'm gonna wanna get a few little cat toys because your leopard geckos may get bored if they're in the enclosure all day. Maybe you're out at work. The noise is enriching for them. Isn't that right, dad? What's that? Cat balls. They're entertaining for leopard geckos. So 4.99. All right. Nope, don't have a budget for it. You can put that back. No, it's 3.99. Dad. The next controversial. Somebody say my name. Controversial. The next controversial subject about setting a leopard gecko up is what bedding should you use? Now literally, there is products like Reptisand here that literally has a leopard gecko on it. Of course, they have some other sand over here. Oopsie. That one's broke. Shh, don't tell. Sanded chips. We have Cypress bedding. It's difficult because the reason why most people, most experts at least would say don't go with sand is because they can have impaction. While they're eating their food or eating whatever, they can actually ingest it, impact it, and it can be a problem. So bedding is always a very difficult thing. I really think the easiest and kind of most simplistic way is to go with some kind of a carpet type of thing. This is actually for a 20 gallon, but we can actually cut it down. This is 15 bucks. I think this is gonna be the bedding that we're gonna use. That way you don't have any problem with your gecko potentially impacting with eating its bedding. I found this little cozy bed. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Leopard gecko's love nap. He's got a hide box. He's got a, look at this beautiful tree. That's not very comfortable. It's memory foam. It's machine washable. We're out of budget. What do you got? This is great too. Mr. Brian, think about this, okay? This could go right in the bottom of the tank. How could that go in the bottom of the tank? It's three times the size of a 10 gallon. It's like a bag of chips. It's mostly air in this. Self-clean litter box. Yeah, you don't have to clean it with food. Now listen, it's kind of- I know you're always trying to get out of cleaning. This isn't gonna work, Mike. Listen, listen, it's kind of expensive. It's 180, but it's on sale. We're on a $100 budget. It's on sale. It's stupid. Put it back. Next essential would be, obviously, water bowl and food dish. Now leopard geckos don't drink a lot of water. They're from the desert. So you can have a pretty small water bowl. And again, if you only have one leopard gecko, you don't need a lot of space for mealworms to go in here. We'll talk more about that a little bit later about food source. These are five bucks a piece. So that's another 10 bucks. Look at this modern art. What even is that? I think it's a flute. Oh, I played Pokemon. Remember these guys? The Pokemon? These look like alphabets. Yeah. I knew I should have left them at home. I told you that from the get-go. I love your jokes. So we're up to $55. And the next thing you really want is a hide. Leopard geckos are from areas where there's lots of caves and crevices. And they're gonna spend most of the daytime actually hiding out and then wander around more at night. So this hide is pretty cool. It looks kind of naturalistic, which is awesome. You can even put some sphagnum moss in here to kind of a dampness. And this is only 10 bucks. Dad, look at this one. This one's only 17 bucks. Look how cool that hide is. That is pretty cool. Compared to 10 bucks for just a log, you get seven more dollars and this actually looks pretty cool. That's just mean. Okay, you've sold me. Connie, look. It's a conure. It's my favorite. They're so cute, don't you think so? Something like that. Can we get going? Get it? Gecko. I like that one. I think that would work. Connie, what are you doing? I'm just picking out a pet fish for a pet leopard gecko. That doesn't make any sense. Because he's a leopard gecko doesn't mean he doesn't deserve a pet of his own. How's he gonna feed him? I'm sure we could like train him or something. That's it. I gotta get going. Get it? Like the gecko. So we have about $17 left that you can kind of go wild with. Do whatever you want to do. You know, these things are super cool. This is $36. Again, it would be a great hide. Really cool things. But one of the things you can do is actually go out in nature. Actually, nature looks better than this stuff anyways. I mean, this stuff looks pretty cool, but you can go out there and if you ever get a tree branch, you can put it in the oven, bake it at 200 degrees for about 10 minutes. It'll kill all the parasites. You can also get rocks. Just make sure you bleach them really well before you put them in your enclosure, just so you don't bring any parasites into it. But use nature. It's free and it's beautiful. That is amazing. It's real leather. Dad! He really needs to get going. Mike, like, it was okay the first time, but like, there's like a limit. Like, I don't know if you know social constructs. No, I really only know gecko. Just think about, it may not be for a gecko, but it's- Irwin or potato. We need this for potato. Genuine leather. It's real leather. Smell it. With our $17 or $18 left, I definitely would get a calcium supplement. If you can find one that actually has vitamin D3 in it, it's even better. For now, at least we have this, and that's only six bucks. That leaves us another about 10 bucks. Look at the personalization right here. You want to see your leopard gecko at night? Get a glow dish, baby. Only six bucks for this glow dish. Isn't that cheaper than your rock? It's cheaper, but I don't want a blue water dish. You don't, but I do. We're out of money, sorry. All right, I'm going to blow the budget a little bit, but I think it's always important to have a thermometer, and a digital thermometer is the way to go. That way you know what your basking light is. That's how you know where your cool spot is. This is $15. We only had about 10, $11 left, so I'm going to be three or $4 over budget. Wait, wait, wait. Why are you putting that back? We're really not getting that? No, we're not getting that. Are you kidding me? You're not going to put that in potato's cage? Zero. Oh, why? Soaked potato. Honestly, I'll just buy it. Where are you going? And this is why I have daddy issues. I'm going to get some blood worms. Wow, this is perfect. They got the bigger bag of dog food. That one's only $30. This one's $43.75. Mr. Brian. I suppose you could have done the easy way too, and they actually have a $99.99 set up that has everything in it. It's got the tank, it's got the top, and you don't have to get creative. One thing I did notice on here is it has a basking light. It doesn't have a UVB light, so you are sacrificing a UVB light if you go with it. But hey, it's still a decent setup, and you don't have to even think about it. Just come here, buy it, and you're done. Dude, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, man. Let me get a bite out of that. That's a real T-Rex. Mike found this. Hear us out. It's a hamster wheel, but instead- What? It's a hamster wheel, I agree. Leopard guy can go in here, run around the Reptarium or somebody's house, and then you don't have to pay attention to it. You can just hear it. First off, you can never go unsupervised with a banana. Unsupervised fun. Well, like kind of unsupervised. Like, look, oh, he's right there. Or when he's not in it, we could have a little office bowling tournament. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I thought you meant like when he was in it. No, that's terrible. I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, but bringing you guys was the biggest. That hurt my feelings. You know what? We just need to get going without him. Yeah, you're right. Let's get going. Underneath. Thanks for the help. Giving you that. Thank you. Okay, we've got everything. Let's get going. You might've been asking yourself when we were at the pet shop, why didn't we buy a tank? Well, we actually went over on Facebook Marketplace, and for $10, we were able to get a 10-gallon tank and a screen top. And there were several available. So it's a great resource to save a lot of money because brand new, these are about $40 to $50. If you can save yourself a bunch of money, that's the way to do it. But now we have all of our stuff here. First thing we're gonna do is get going with this bedding. I'd like to know down in the comments what you guys think. There's no real kind of perfect situation when it comes to bedding. It's just kind of one of those situations where you gotta use whatever you possibly can. For me, this is kind of the best option that we have available at this particular moment. Although I would certainly love to have something better, there's no doubt about it. Either my scissors are really dull or this stuff is very hard to cut. Not sure which one it is. And now, that fits in there perfect. I'm gonna start with the decoration first to kind of just keep this down. The one thing that is a problem with these types of mats, if you don't have stuff that's holding them down, the leopard gecko can actually go underneath there. Because the leopard gecko wants to go high, it also wants to hide underneath the thing. So you wanna make sure you have enough rocks and other stuff that's holding this down flat so that there's no way that the leopard gecko can get underneath it. Next up, we'll just place the water bowl and the food dish right over on this side. And just make sure you clean these before you put water in them and certainly food in them as well. Like I mentioned, I like thermometers because I just think like, hey, you never know really what the temperature is. Sometimes you can think like, oh, we've got a nice hot spot in there. It's great, right? But then you put a temperature in there and you find out like, holy cow, it's way cooler than I expected. And one of these is really nice because basically it just has a suction cup on it. And you can put that suction cup wherever you want. I'm just gonna stick it right behind the tree over here. And that way I can put it down over here and I get an idea of what the hot spot is. The actual thermometer is outside the cage so it's not gonna interfere with anything. Let's go ahead and get a little bit of water and I'm gonna show you what I'm gonna feed them. So depending on the size of your leopard gecko, you can either go with super worms or meal worms. I just basically have some super worms right here I'm gonna put in here. Remember that calcium powder I have? I actually have calcium powder and D3. That's what I use here. And I'm just gonna go ahead and powder those worms. That way when they eat the worms, they're getting that calcium and they're getting that D3, which is really important. They don't get that metabolic bone disease that we talked about earlier. I'm just gonna pour a little bit of water. Don't drink a lot of water. Really most of the moisture they get is gonna come from what they're eating themselves. You know, there are people I know that don't even keep water in with leopard geckos. I just think if you have a living animal, you have to have clean water in there so I'm putting clean water in there. And again, you can deck out this thing with that natural stuff that I talked about. Stones, rocks, maybe you have a nice piece of driftwood that you've, again, baked just to make sure there's no parasites in it. They come in here for climbing. You can do whatever you want. You can put a backdrop on this, whatever you wanna do. After that, we just basically have the light to put on. So first we'll put the screen top on. So then the light, and again, one of these is gonna be UV and the other one is gonna be the basking light. On this side of the cage, typically the hot spot and the hide spot is best on the same side. At least that's what I've always done. This is gonna be the cool side. UV will kind of penetrate everywhere. That heat is still gonna heat the aquarium all the way around, probably five or six degrees, but directly below the basking light, you're probably gonna get an eight to 10 degree jump. That basking should be about 90 or 95 degrees. Again, I have my thermometer set over there and that's pretty much it. So there you have it, guys. And it's set up that costs us just over $100 and the only reason it was over $100 is because I splurged on this digital thermometer. I could have got a normal thermometer and been down to about $97 or $98. So you don't have to spend $400 on a leopard gecko cage that you don't want. You could do it for under 100 bucks. So now it's time to grab my leopard gecko and see how it likes its new enclosure. So there you have it, guys. A gecko set up for under $100 on a budget. It's time for me to get going. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Hope you guys enjoyed today's video. If you did, there's a playlist that you can watch all kinds of videos. 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