FBT Vivarium Preparations

[synikalspinstress]

It sounds like you'll be doing pretty much everything necessary for a full scale small vivarium anyway.

You ever have one of those... lightbulb moments? I'd thought about springtails, but, that almost seemed like too much? But, now that you've said this, I'm like... why not? If I'm doing the rest of it anyway, and it'd certainly make things easier on me. Thank you!

As for the dish, simply submerge it a bit in the substrate and don't worry about how it relates to the false bottom. As far as I know the only relationship between the dish and the false bottom is that splashes from the dish won't saturate the soil and will simply drain down. It shouldn't be a problem, I would just make sure to have some substrate below it between the bottom of the dish and the false bottom.

My problem is that the container I've picked is around 5 inches deep, so it just seemed like a lot of substrate. But, if I go with a bioactive system, then I wouldn't be replacing the substrate very often, if ever. If it came to it, I suppose I could elevate the area around the dish a little.

How deep should the drainage layer/false bottom be? An inch? (That'd leave me with six or so inches of height between the top of the vivarium and the substrate.) I'll be using the PVC pipe method.

And don't worry about being wordy--my first post was a novel itself.