UTH good or bad?

[BigMama]

Hello everyone! I just joined this forum in hopes to get some advice from people I am hoping have a good amount of knowledge concerning leopard gecko husbandry and care.

I have had a leopard gecko in the past and when i did I had researched the heck out of it, had the set up perfect at least that's what I thought. I recently got a leo again and as I have been double checking my care facts, I am finding conflicting information to what I knew to be the way to keep leopard geckos.. and now I am questioning if I am rusty or wise.

I joined a leo group on face book asking for help with the same subject but thier advice isn't sticking right with me so I wanted to get a second opinion.

First and foremost, are UTHs bad and dangerous for leopard geckos? Because I was told they needed belly heat to digest food. But this group I am in says UTHs are a no go, and that you have to use a heat bulb.

I use a ceramic bulb to help keep the temps right in the tank, but also an UTH on the warm side. So am I crazy? Are UTHs outdated?

Also, I was hoping to get some info on substrate. Back when I owned my last leo I was told no loose substrate, absolutely no sand due to growing bacteria and impaction risk, no repticarpet. That you used paper towels for cheap easy, and high quality peal and stick tiles for the bottom.. now I understand they are saying the peal and stick are bad due to fumes. But now they say no hard substrates, that they need a mix of dirt and sand. Or the bio substrates.

I was looking into the Excavator clay and joshes frogs bio desert bedding.
Thoughts?

 

[acpart]

There is more than one way to do things. Here are my thoughts;
heat: I've been keeping leopard geckos for over 20 years. Until recently, the accepted way to do things was to use a UTH and I continue to do that. Recently, there has been more interest in using heat emitting lights that are specially developed for nocturnal animals with the idea that a heat source from above is more natural, that leopard geckos are usually active at the beginning and the end of the day and that some of them do benefit from basking. I imagine that in the wild, while the ground temperature may get up into the 90's, it doesn't stay that way 24/7. I think either method is OK, though I'm sticking to the UTH because my cages aren't set up for that kind of lighting. I think there would be a problem with using a heat emitter as well because that's going to really dry out the air in the enclosure. If I were designing a leopard gecko cage nowadays for the first time, I would use a UTH with a thermostat on one side of the cage and may choose to use a small light in the middle of the cage for basking if a gecko chose to do that, while keeping the other side of the cage cool.
Substrate: There is still controversy about this. I keep my leopard geckos on ceramic tile with a coco-fiber humid hide. I did keep 3 leopard geckos on coco fiber for about 5 years and it was fine. I'd go with either. Here are things that I do and don't recommend with my reasons: calci-sand encourages them to ingest it and I've read about major impaction problems; play sand is a better alternative than calci-sand, but leopard geckos don't live in the Sahara desert and I see no reason to put them on sand; coco fiber or excavator clay gets closer to the hard packed earth they live on in the wild so that could be an option; paper towel and newspaper are ugly, make it easy for crickets to hide there and tear easily; repti-carpet could be an option, though some geckos get their claws stuck in it and if they keep peeing on it, it needs to be switched out and washed which I think is a pain. I go with ceramic tile and diggable humid hide as I mentioned above.

My leopard geckos are mostly 8 years old. They were hatchlings when my entire collection was infected with crypto. About half of the ones I had at that time have died during the past 8 years. My oldest leopard gecko died 2 years ago at the age of 18.

Aliza