introduction to beech chip

[Shmotz666]

well as most of you know, im still newish to the corn snake world, and this is the first snake i own which is moving up to beech chip.

He has just been moved in, and already he is scouting it all out, burying and moving all around, he has his old water bowl and hide, just so its not totally new.

it was great watching him bury into it, i laughed because he tried to get under his waterbowl, after 5 minutes of little bits of beech chip moving, and rustling, he gave in and sacked that idea off. lol.

What is the best way to maintain beech chip? its cheap which is great, i got alot for just over a pound. But i want to know the best ways to keep it clean. Do you shovel the mucky bits out when your snake poops? if so what do you use to scoop it out with? how often should i change the whole lot?

thanks alot for listening. ;D

[zarozinia]

Hi again
we use beech for most of our adult snakes, but thats only because we bought a huge bag for £20. When that runs out we might change to aspen or smaller beech chip. We use orchid bark combined with coco fibre for a couple of our boas.
When cleaning we scoop out the poo and surrounding chips using a large serving spoon, then we clean the floor underneath it using ark cleanse. We mainly spot clean, daily but once every4 - 6 weeks or so we take all the chips out and clean the entire vivarium.
I think there is a long thread on livefood forums about how often people clean their vivs and there are many posts on the topic of substrate.
One big diference is that we feed small snakes in the viv, (no risk of swallowing paper towel substrate), but with our adults we still feed in the viv IF they feed straight away in front of us but we place the mouse on either a lid from a tupperware box or a plate/saucer to prevent them ingesting substrate ( even when they strike and take the mouse immediately we like to have something underneath them to prevent ingestion of substrate. You cant be too careful. A lot of people feed out of the viv.

[Shmotz666]

cheers angi, he pooped today too, dirty boy. so i scooped it out, cleaned it with bio-clean on a tissue, made sure it was all clean. then placed some fresh beech chip in the same place. ill go and buy a serving spoon on sunday from morrisons. so i got one

it looks so much nicer with beech chip, theyre dead small pieces, something like 1.42 for 1/2 kilo from Coast to Coast. im gonna feed him on a tupperware lid too, i read it on another board thats the thing to do. thanks for the help