Vacuuming Guinea Pig Cages- First Try

Today I noticed the upstairs girls' cage was quite dirty (day 4 after change) and there was a LOT of poo. I decided that it was a pain to brush it all up while they were running around scattering it, and I would try to use the vacuum to clean up the fleece.

You are probably thinking, ahh... those poor girls, but it wasn't bad at all and I do believe I will try it again. I'm even considering finding another vacuum to use downstairs instead of the sweeping. I used the hose and the vacuum isn't too loud, but they stayed away from it for the most part. I used the lint brush attachment and sucked away. There wasn't enough pee anywhere to cause issues with the vacuum and it was a lot less stressing on my back.

One guinea pig, who is especially sensitive was scared, but she is always hiding so I took her out while I was doing it. Their fleece is now mostly clean, and tonight we are considering putting in bunk beds for the girls to use instead of all of their pigloos.

As for pigloos we are getting 5 today from a donation, 3 large ones that I am particularly excited about, and 2 smaller ones that are more than welcome in our larger cages. I might even be able to add another floor to one of the cages so that the pigs can have a pigloo up there as well. So much fun to have guinea pigs and to check out the cages photo gallery on the forum

Guinea Pig Bedding

I have been in talks lately to get some fleece guinea pig bedding from Piggy BedSpreads. Martha makes beautiful bedding for the cages that lasts and doesn't smell. I may help with her website at some point but I wanted to discuss how great I think her product is.

For a long time other websites have been trying to figure out the best guinea pig bedding to use. From products like Care Fresh, to Soft sorbent, pine shavings, aspen shavings, there are tons of products to choose from. This article from Guinea Pig Cages on Bedding is a great read. Even after all of this, they still haven't found the perfect option though.

Since we started rescue we have gone with the fleece/towels information provided on The Fleece Project Study on the Guinea Pig Cages website we figured out how to do the cages with them not smelling. We did use aspen shavings before, but it was a mess all the time, and our dog would eat the shavings that were all around the house, because no matter how hard we tried they would get everywhere.

The guinea pigs seem to love the fleece, and most of them popcorned around when we put them on it for the first time.

I do have to say we need to clean cages a bit more often, instead of it lasting a week for fleece we are able to get about 5 days out of it. This of course, could be because we have more than the suggested number of cavies in each cage, but we use C&C cages mostly and they have a ton of room. For instance right now we have a 6x2 grid cage and 8 pigs are in it.

So what do you use for bedding? What works best for different sexes, different breeds, etc?