A storm proof critter home

How well the new acrylic critter home perform in a big storm? After several days of winter storm, we do the clean up. The critter home is of course dry no matter what. It's plastic in a raised platform that cannot possibly be flooded.

I had Velcro attached to bubble wrap sheet to cover the windows, so that it can be taken off easily like a window. My wife used to tear them off straight away if I use duck tapes - too ugly. The Velcro fell off in the storm, so I have to use the wooden door to cover the open windows. The door was covered by bubble wrap sheet only, without the wooden door.

Some cardboard used to cover the windows fell off. I used tapes on top of them to make them water proof. It's obviously not enough.

Now everything should be hosed off. So cardboard should go. Now that my wife don't tear duck tape anymore, I use duck tape to seal all windows, covered with double or triple layer of bubble wrap sheets.

Cleaning up the sticky poop on the plastic and around the cage is too much work. So I decided that everything should be hosed clean in place. I drilled an opening at the outer cage corner. I attached a 1" diameter PVC pipe as the drain guide, with height about 0.5". Actually I glued the guide before I drill small holes through it and then knock out an opening. The drain will be covered with a 1" PVC cap when not in use. The whole cage is now raised about ground on 2" high wooded frame to accommodate the drain.

The option is to put the drain over a big bucket during cleaning. I may also fit pipes to carry the waste water to some paved area with drainage, or composing hole.

A clean critter home

You can potty train critters, but their poop still go everywhere. My kids bring them into the house for exercise all the time, which bothers me. We line their home with newspapers, but they attack them. We used flat pieces of cardboard, which is rather good and warm too. But in no time the cardboard are stuck with poops. Changing cardboard everyday is rather expensive.

Critter bedding or litter is OK, but practically you need a deep layer to absorb things and then cover them. If it's not deep enough, the bedding materials will thin out quickly. It's just too expensive to cover the whole critter home with bedding, unless you pets are very small.

No wonder commercial farms use wire floors, so liquid and small things will drop below. But inappropriate wires are cruel to animals' feet and nails. I can also say that some kind of sticky poops will be very difficult to clean on wires.

My conclusion is that critters should be housed in raised platforms, so dirt can easily be swept to the lower level. I found the perfect material that you can easily customize - acrylic. It's non-recyclable plastic, but it last forever.

Acrylic has the same thermal coefficient (property) as hard wood, and everything else so much better. Transparent and food grade are irrelevant properties, but you don't get anything cheaper without them. It's extremely easy to clean than wood. Only laminated wood will give warmer feeling because of the trapped air between, but the edge will attract dirt big time and capillary effect will absorb liquid deep inside.

A 18" x 24" piece of 0.08" thick acrylic sells for less than $10 in the hardware stores. Online I found a shop that sells 2' x 4' sheets 1/16" thick about the same price, and increases with thickness. I use 1/8" thick sheets for rigid flat things and 1/16" thick sheets for small 3D things. Different brands of acrylic also have different strengths, so the thickness you need and price varies. On eBay you can find stores with good deals, especially for smaller pieces. Because of the package size for large sheets, postal do cost something.

I wouldn't use a cutting knife to cut acrylic, not even for the thin ones. I tried. Invest in a jigsaw as you would with wood. You should use find dense metal blades and cut at max speed. Wood cutting blades will be a disaster. The cutting will be effortless. If you have a small cutting table for woodwork, you can get very good edges. The worst that can happen is that you cut too fast for thick sheets, the sheets get too hot, the edges melt a little, the cuts may stick together and close themselves.

1/8" and thicker sheets feel like a piece of glass, and you can handle it like metal, using nuts and bolts. You need a special drill bit for plastics, or you cannot drill the hole precisely where it should be.

The advantage of acrylic is that you can weld pieces together using glue. There's a special acrylic glue for that. For perfect joints, there's the liquid glue that goes up the joints via capillary action. You do need to have square pieces and ways to hold them together. If your critters are not that fuzzy, you can use Goog glue. It also works with acrylic, PVC and many other things.

My design is a 20"x20" piece without the bathroom, supporting by 2" high PVC couplings. PVC is very cheap and easy to cut by hand. If you can be precise, you can cut the raisers from PVC tubes that cost about nothing. There are a lot of acrylic accessories, square, rounded and triangular tubes for you to build on. Also hinges and flexible joints.

The bathroom is 2" deep, 1'x1' in size. The bathroom is basically below the platform, but there are low walls on three sides to stop litters from going anywhere, except for the front entrance. The PVC handle for the bathroom is designed for kids to simply lift it up and empty it in the bin.

I use 1/8" thick sheet for the main platform, and 1/16" sheet for the rest. My shop includes simple straight cuts so I did no cutting at all for the platform and the box.

You can do a lot of accessories on the platform. The watch tower like thing is the holder for the stupid bottles that you need to hang from outside of cages. Using PVC and coupling means that I can unplug it when I need to work on the platform, and for easy cleaning. Food trays are secured using nuts and bolts so critters cannot attack them. The trays can also be rotated, and detached by simply lifting them up, for easy cleaning.

The whole platform is put into a house with a narrow gap between the platform and the walls, so dirt can easily scooped over to fall down.

The good. The critters like the plastic, sleeping on it like pigs. They also like the bathroom, with no extra toilet training for the new loo. Long nails aren't a problem with the plastic. The platform can easily be cleaned by a toy spade, and maybe a wet wipe.

The bad. There are the small hard and dry bullet poops and the sticky poops. The latter stick on the plastic and very hard to get rid off. Eventually they will dry up thoroughly and drop off. But when they are still wet there's no way to get rid of them.

The best way seems to be CLR cleaner, the biodegradable spray version. Spray, wait for 10 minutes and the hardened sticky poop will go. It's organic acid so other strong acids may work, including some biodegradable tire cleaners. Oxiclean may work as they will attack all organic materials, but probably take too long.

I think of using cheap disposable lining materials on the plastic surface to ease cleaning. Cling films work only on very clean acrylic. Drawer linings are too expensive. Packing paper may be suitable if they stick to the plastic with static electricity so the critters cannot attack.

The other way is to use two more thin acrylic sheets, one to cover the platform, while the other is being cleaned.

The alternative is to make a drain hole in the outer house. So you can hose everything inside the house and collect all the dirt under the house with a bucket. It's good to have a water proof partition so the critters can stay on one side while the other side is being cleaned.

Keeping outdoor pets warm in winter

Let me write this up before winter is up. One day I checked the outdoor temperature and was alarmed that it fell to around 45F. The critters are like living in the fridge, and not a lot above freezing (32F). If you add in the wind chill factor, it's freezing.

Our critters' home is converted from something else. I taped some of the windows and used cardboard to block the others. The cage door is the problem. It's pretty irregular, not square nor completely vertical. There's also the stupid water bottle that needed to hang on the outside. I used sheets of bubble wrapping to cover it, supported by thin PVC pipes, and held tight against the door by rubber bands and strings. Air trapped in the bubbles should be great heat insulators. The tiny hole is sealed by clear tape so I can see the digital temperature reading inside - it was a spare central heating control panel. It was designed so that kids can easily put it on and off quickly. And for very cold nights, clips can be used to make sure everything is air tight.

Ideally, I need a heater to bring the temperature back to above 60F or higher. A simple light bulb with a shield will be enough, but I wouldn't want to disrupt the nightlife of the critters. An infrared bulb for pets may be good, but I still think that it may be too bright. The cheap ones may just be colored dark red.

I think the fake stones for reptiles are perfect. The critters can't attack it. It will not be too hot to touch on the surface. It will just like another warm or hot body. It will be easy to clean. But I thought of a cheaper solution - soldering irons.

When your soldering isn't in use, it can be used as a heater. Better still I had an old broken iron, the soldering tip of which cannot be replaced. Just happened that I have a mounting bracket for thin PVC pipes. I mount the handle of the soldering iron on so that the tip don't touch anything but air. I surround the iron with wood to shield it from critters.


I was right that the soldering iron should have something like an auto cutoff to prevent overheat, but not a fuse. I can just leave the iron on overnight. I also have plenty of unused timers for Christmas lights.

The critters wasn't afraid to stay near it. They feel at ease.

Being a small heater, there's no point hanging high up in the cage. It have to be near the floor and near the critters. So I should have use acrylic for the shield. The openings should be much small and finer so no litters, pieces of dry food can get in to "burn". Also if the soldering tip ever touches the shield, acrylic will just melt instead of turning brown like wood.