A degu cage works hard in a week. Degus roll in bathing sand daily, gnaw constantly, climb every bar, and wedge hay and bedding into corners an owner barely notices. One focused maintenance hour, done in the same order each week, keeps the bath usable, the bars safe, and the cage structure honest before small chewing damage becomes an escape or an injury.
Care for the Bathing Sand First
Start with the bath, because degus maintain their coats by rolling in bathing sand, and used sand quickly fills with shed hair, droppings, and moisture. Sieve the sand to remove debris and clumps, top it up or replace it fully when sieving no longer leaves it clean and dry, and wash and dry the bath container itself before refilling it. Damp or dirty sand does a poor job on a degu's coat and quickly stops being inviting, so a degu ignoring the bath is often reporting on the sand, not on bathing itself.
Offer the bath on the degus' schedule during your maintenance work. Many keepers provide the bath for set sessions rather than leaving it in the cage all week, which keeps the sand cleaner and turns bathing into a supervised activity; whatever pattern your degus know, keep it consistent. Put the refreshed bath in while you are present, let each degu roll, dig, and shake out properly, and watch that no one hogs the container while a cage mate waits. Degus bathe in this dry material and should not be washed in water, so the entire bath job is about the condition of the sand and the container, never about wetting the animal.
Check the sand supply while you work. Running out midweek leaves coats greasy and degus frustrated, so the hour is the moment to note how much bathing sand remains and add it to your supply list before it becomes urgent.
Inspect Bars and Welds by Hand
Move to the bars, and inspect by touch as much as by sight. Degus chew persistently, and they test cage bars, welds, ledges, and fittings with their teeth all week. Run your hand along welds and joints feeling for cracked joins, sharp raised points, and bars that flex or have been thinned by gnawing. A sharp weld end can cut a mouth or a foot, and a weakened bar is an escape route under construction.
Wipe bars and ledges where urine, grease, and dust build up, especially around favorite perching and sleeping levels. Check wooden ledges and shelves for deep chewing, splintering, and soaked patches, and replace pieces that have become rough or unstable. Tighten loose fittings, confirm door latches engage fully, and look at the cage corners and base tray for the chewed edges degus specialize in; a corner chewed through plastic is a hole a determined degu will widen nightly.
Rotate or replace chew material as part of the same inspection. Fresh safe wood and other chewables give teeth a better target than cage fittings, and a degu whose chewing suddenly concentrates on bars may be telling you the provided material has run out, gone stale, or no longer interests the group.
Finish With the Whole Cage in View
Use the last minutes for the wider check the hour makes possible. Confirm water bottles flow, food dishes are sound, hay is dry, and no bedding or nesting material is wound around bars or bottle spouts. Note anything you found, a thinning weld, a chewed corner, a bottle that drips, so the next hour starts with a repair list rather than a rediscovery.
Keep the order stable week to week: sand, bath session, bars and welds, ledges and fittings, final look. A stable order means nothing depends on memory, and a helper covering for you can follow the same sequence. Splitting the hour among helpers works better when KinsLe assigns the bath area to one person through Care Teams and the weld inspection to someone else.