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I'm considering buying a Hybrid nest Small, but I have a little question, can I use my heating mat with it ?
I know that it has a fitting for a heating cable, but I don't have one.

Rovvov99 wrote:I'm considering buying a Hybrid nest Small, but I have a little question, can I use my heating mat with it ?
I know that it has a fitting for a heating cable, but I don't have one.

Placing the nest on a mat with the water in the moisture tray will cause it to create a lot of condensation inside the nest (don't ask me how I know this...LOL), thats why it's designed to have a very low heat on the end of it allowing the heat to transfer thru the plastic to the nest on only one end. A mat would heat the entire thing and most mats (I did Herps, snakes, lizards) are way too hot for ants.

Condensation is a very difficult problem to fix with formicaria. Even with my heat cable on the one end of my Hybrid nest, I will still occasionally get condensation on the glass. It's not necessarily a show-stopper so to speak, it may just obscure the view a bit. The idea with the Hybrid nest series was to keep the heat as far as possible from the water. We did this by experimenting with a few different locations and ended up putting it up higher in the nest and at the top of the nest. Then we put the areas exposing the water down toward the bottom of the nest.

I will just turn off the heat cable or remove it when I want to the condensation to go away.