I want to do a bioactive terrarium for my skink but I’m not sure about the enclosure. Do you think sliding glass doors or a hinged one would be better?
Worried about the isopods getting out.
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Sliding doors will have a decent gap unless you use weather stripping but then it makes the doors harder to open.
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@mdld It is my humble opinion that sliding doors are not ideal if you are using any kind of loose substrate, especially in a bioactive that requires several inches of substrate for the isopods and springtails. Every time you remove your snake you may drag some of the substrate out with it onto the floor……
I had hinged doors on my Boaphile enclosures but I used clean unprinted newspaper in all of them……
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I have hinged doors on both my PVC enclosures. I like them. I feel like they’d be isopod-proof, as there aren’t really any gaps. Sliding doors will leave a gap, as someone else mentioned.
I feel like the main advantage of sliding doors is that you can take them out and open up the whole front of the enclosure for cleaning and maintenance, which is nice. Most enclosures with hinged doors have two separate doors, with a strip of PVC between them, so you can’t fully open up the front, as there will always be that PVC obstruction in the middle. It can be a minor inconvenience when cleaning or wrangling a wiggly critter, but I don’t find it to be that big a deal. Here’s one of mine to show what I mean (it’s a little messy, don’t judge me 
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Another thing to keep in mind is that most hinged doors are acrylic, whereas most sliding doors are glass. Glass is heavier and shatters more easily, but acrylic scratches much more easily, and can become warped with high humidity. There’s pros and cons to each material, which is best can depend on what you’re keeping in there. For example, a lizard with sharp claws might scratch an acrylic door, but that’s not really a concern with a snake.
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Sliding doors do provide slightly better view by not having a center support bar but aside from that I prefer hinged for many reasons. Sliding doors have tracts and substrate gets dug up by sinks which pushes it into the tracts. Sliding doors actually make it harder to get into the enclosure since you can’t open both sides at the same time, unless you want to remove them every time you wanna get into the enclosure fully. Sliding doors also scrape and can be difficult to open at times if substrate gets in the tracts, they can just be super annoying 
. Hinged doors can be opened at the same time which is easier for cleaning and maintenance since you don’t have to remove them entirely, they also don’t have tracts for substrate to get into and are just easier to clean in my opinion since you don’t have the tracts to deal with. Only con to hinged is depending on the enclosure you get, there’s gonna be a center support bar that can block some view into the enclosure (but can be a bit of a hindrance with maintenance if your a roamer like I am lol) but if your ok with a center support bar then I say hinged all the way!
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The Boaphiles I had didn’t have a center strip in the middle. The whole door opened. It had latches in the upper right and upper left corners. It was one door that opened out and down.
And I agree about the tracks. They would be very difficult to maintain.
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If you go with a slider, install a litter dam. I try for twice the height of the substrate.
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I got a litter dam on mine for my skink and he still manages to get litter in the track 
my main issue though is my isopods and dermestid beetles like to use things in the enclosure to climb out and die in the track. It’s ridiculous the lengths they go through to kill themselves 
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I find that the litter dam is also a great place to lay in on food night(gtp) that way he can get a good mouthful of T-shirt when I open to feed. Lol. Only happened once.
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I like sliding doors the best. When you stack cages, the folding door gets in the way of the cage below. Also, with my retics, it’s nice to slide one door open to feed. Much safer for me as I open the side they are not on.
However, most of my cages are rack systems now. So I have tubs and big drawers that just pull out. On feeding day, I just use my snake hook to open the drawers. And my snake tongs to feed the rat to them.
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