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Fleece? Not a bathroom!

gpigluver14

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Hi, um, if you use fleece or towels, how often do you clean them, or how often do they need to be cleaned??

Part of my cage is lined with fleece (the other part with Carefresh bedding) and within a couple of days my two pigs have peed on them many times! I want to be able to clean them every two weeks, but within a couple days some spots are soaken wet with their pee!! And I have to pick up literally piles of poop every day! Help! Do your pigs pee on the fleece as much as mine do?
 

Ly&Pigs

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Do you have anything absorbent under your fleece? It should wick the pee down to whatever is under it. Maybe you have the wrong kind of fleece or one that doesn't wick well. You won't be able to go for two weeks with fleece at all. At the max, 5-7 days depending on the size of your cage and you will have to spot clean the poos daily. Fleece is cost effective in the long run but it's a higher maintenance bedding.
 

WillowWinnieMom

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I have 2 girls and just switched over to fleece. I have two hay lofts with CareFresh/Aspen mix. I LOVE the fleece. It is a lot less work to clean and a lot less messy. However, I hear what you are saying. My pigs just "go" anywhere so there is poop all over. I take what typically you would use as a food scoop for dog or cat food and just scoop it up once to twice a day. It takes just a couple of minutes. I do a full cage cleaning once a week and I don't think the cage smells at all which I am completely impressed! However, I do have a large C&C cage for them. I took the suggestions of washing the fleece 3-4 times before using it and that seems to be the trick. I am not sure if you could go every other week with cleaning but you can certainly give it a try. I guess it would depend on how large your cage is and how many layers of towels you have. You could give it a try and see how it goes! Good Luck!
 

MilwCavyMom

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I use fleece on my entire cage and spot clean poo twice a day, and switch out the fleece and towels every 3-4 days. Once you have washed the fleece enough time, as Ly said, it'll go through to whatever is below. I love it much better than using the bedding.
 

Slave to the Wheek

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We have posted hundreds of threads on this subject and I particularly have spent dozens of hours of my life posting on this topic on this subject and I'm not the only one. Many of us have given the most awesome advice on the subject and most of us are simply avoiding answering the same basic questions. It's becoming tiresome to have to repeat the same things to people who are not willing to do the research I'm afraid. If you want to really get good answers, you need to do a forum search on fleece and spend some time weeding through the threads.

I think we need get the "Fleece Project" thread updated with a more specific description of what you do to maintain the fleece so that we can refer to to that thread at least.

Fleece bedding systems are a very labor intensive bedding. You cannot let it go without suckin' or sweepin' up poo at LEAST once but preferrably twice a day depending on your cage size and amount of pigs. You cannot just drop a piece of fleece into the cage and consider that 'fleece bedding'. Using fleece takes a lot of research as well as some trial and error if you want to, or in my case HAVE to make it work properly.

Even the most sophisticated fleece bedding system cannot go more than a week on average, and that is WITH a huge Cube and Coroplast habitat, very few pigs and with twice daily poo sweeping. I can stretch mine out to 10 days on occassion but that's it and my system has been very finely tested and tuned to get it to that point.

Be careful when choosing to use a fleece bedding system.. If one does not have the time or inclination to set-up a fleece bedding system or to do the work to maintain it one is be better off switching to aspen or carefresh. I'm afraid to admit it sometimes, but fleece isn't for everyone. It's got to fit into your situation for it to work for you.

Improperly maintained fleece can be a huge health problem for guinea pigs, and can encourage feet fungus (bumblefoot) and other problems because sitting on wet blankets is not healthy. Neither is sitting in piles of poo. In addition the odor your pigs get if you don't maintain it can be overwhelming for the strongest of noses..
 

gpigluver14

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Please forgive my lack of research with that last post. I read this whole post, and now I know a whole lot more: https://www.guineapigcages.com/forum/bedding/21568-fleece-project-study.html?highlight=fleece .....

This is the order of the layers that I'll have in the cage: newspaper, towels, then fleece, and a black trash bag on the very bottom. Turns out I didn't have the right kind of fleece before.

I have a blanket that I think I can use, instead, which I'm pretty sure is fleece that I got from the fabric section at Walmart.

I don't really want to use Carefresh in the section where I want fleece because it's about 2 x 2.

Thanks for the replies everybody........
 
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