Overview

UV lighting is important to most life on earth, it helps many body functions in alot of animals including humans, it is very important for reptiles as it helps the production of D3 which is essential for bone health and other organ health. You can suppliment D3 in reptile diets but the UVB exposure on top is a must as this is the best way to avoid uneeded health problems such as MBD, metabolic bone desiease. 

Ferguson UV Zones

The first thing you will come across when researching UVB lamps is the ferguson UVB Zones, most UVB lamps will have a level on them explaining this , however due to the different brands using different marketing and scales it can be annoying to rememebr if you change between brands due to current avalability and cost. Below you can see a scale for comparisons against UVI.

T5 VS T8

When buying a UV Unit you will likely come across T5 and T8 bulbs, these two are long tube UVB units and generally start at around 30cms and get up to 90cm. The t8 unit is the older thicker style, there output is about half as good as the newer t5 units and they last around 9 months with a good UV output before needing replacement, they are still common but the hobby seems to be moving towards the T5 units which have a higher output of UV over a larger range they also last around 12 months with good UVB output before they need replacing. On another note these bulbs are on track to being banned in 2027 due to there contents of Mercury.

What to buy?

Don't skimp on UVB bulbs it never pays off, i have myself fell into this trap and it has cost more in the long run i have had multiple failures of UVB bulbs from off brands, Stick to the big ones they last longer and are alot less likely to cut out compleatly.

Here is a list of some of the bigger ones that i trust and have tested myself.

• Arcadia
• Reptile systems
• LumenIZE(Arcadia new)
• Zoo Med
• Exo Terra

What to avoid ?

Stick to the main brands , never use off brand UVB bulbs they in my expereience have alot lower lifespans overall and ive had more faults with these than any of the trusted brands.

Bulb sizes

There are various sizes of bulbs in terms of types these are:

In terms of sizes there are :

How do UVB bulbs work?

UVB Distance from animals

Covering UVB

When you fit a uvb fitting, make sure to not cover the unit in any way and if you cover it with mesh you have to consider that the mesh ususally takes around 30% of the UVB energy away from the units so this is important when considering where you are putting the UVB lamps, are you getting the output you want?

Compact bulbs

This is a contentious issue in the exotics hobby alot of keepers stay clear of these and i agree for alot of species, they simply do not give enough UVB to be useful in most cases, however, if you find a unit cheap and you care for species such as South amarican horned frogs that are not considered to really need alot of UVB and most people dont use any UVB lighting for them you cant really go to wrong by providing them this little bit of UVB and its more likely to be a benifit to the animal than not providing them any at all.

UVI scale and doing your own research. (Advanced)

Once you have a good grasp of all of the above and know what the general scales are for each species and what is recomended on other sites i have found that the next step is to try and find out about your species you keep yourself and check where its from and its daily UV exposures on the day of each month. Use iNaturlist to find the species distribution, go to the actual page of the species and click the map not indevidual observations as this will not show the distribution.

The example below shows the range of the Oriental Long-tailed Grass Lizard (Takydromus sexlineatus) I have marked 5 points below for the next step.

Then once you have found the distribution pick 3-5 points within the distribution, generally i pick far corners and a centre point of the distribution. Then goto Yourweather.co.uk and pick there UVI map.

From here you will need to work out another 3-5 points of data for each time of the day. 3 as a minimum because you want to see one at sunrise (Dawn) one at Midday and one at sunset (Dusk), to work this out you will need to add the hours on from the bar at the bottom to align with the timezone here is an example of time zone differences on the link below to help with adding or subtracting hours.

When you have added the time zone hours to the time you want to achieve, for example DP1 which is a place called Kalay which has a sunrise time of 5:54 am, you can find these times at time and date.com as the button below shows.

to work out this first datapoint you need to find the closest hour, in this case 6am and then add the time zone difference from the UK time so this will be -6.5 hours, round upwards so this will be 1:00pm at this point there is no UVI in Kalay but its getting close, this could be because of cloud coverage or terrain.

Once you have charted all of the data you can represent it in a table like as shown below for the following data points

DP1 - Kalay, Myanmar

DP2 - Udon Thani, Thailand

DP3 - ShenZhen China

DP4 - Glumbang, Indonisia

DP5 - Surakarta, Indonesia

Once you have this data you can manipulate it in Excel as a graph to show the dips and peaks during the day. Follow this process and save the data once a month and you will have a fairly accurate representation of the real world conditions the species you are researching has in its natural enviroment. You can then use the data accordingly to setup more accurate timings for your animals for a more scientific approach to husbandry.

You can then use this data to setup the correct UVI values for the month of august and timings to the Arcadia Iluminize UVB fittings on the app. as shown below.

So first off you will need to make sure the bulb is correct as you will want a 10-11 UVI maximum output, once you have found this out it is a matter of working out the intensity percentage so, if 10 is the daily maximum it will be 100% intensity at that time if it is 4 then it will need to be set to 40% intensity and so on,

here is an example below of the app, it's simple to setup in half an hour chunks, you could in theory choose one location from the data you collected and get each hour of Ubisoft exposure there for the ammount of daylight hours to get a more accurate curve, for less of a time consuming endeavour you can use the data you collected and average it out and draw a curve to reflect the highs and lows of I've exposure during the day. 

this isn't a fixed way of doing this there are probabaly more efficient ways to collect this data this is just an example I use at this current time to get my own data.

As you can see from the app image below you first select the device name 

Once you have selected the device name it will connect and show the charts below

After this you can then use your data collected to set the intensity of the bulb so if we are working with 10.0 bulb then 100% intensity will be an UVI rating of 10 if part of the data you collected has a rating of 4 UVI then the intensity would be 40% ect.

Are you ready?

It is also important to consider other factors when working these uvb values out such as the animals environment, yes they might be in an environment where there recieving a high dose of uvb but are they basking in it, are they underground? Use your own research in conjunction with others for the best results, I also advise only to do this kind of research when you are ready to, learn all you can from what others have already wrote and then when you hit that ceiling do your own additional to improve your husbandry.

also this is just the first step towards these additional self research, this kind of research can be applied in all parts of animal husbandry such as heat and humidity down to the microbiome of the areas the animals live in.