Please help!! Need help w/ enclosure questions etc

Please help!
I have a bunch of questions, people at pet stores are telling me a million different things.

1. The calcium sand-- is it a problem? What else should I use....?
2. Heating pad-- I bought a zoo med heating pad today because the guy at the pet store said I should turn off the heater emitter lamp and the uvb at night and use the heating pad... is that good advice?
The problem with that is that my enclosure is PVC and I'm not sure if I can stick it to the bottom and it will still absorb the heat through the PVC..? He didn't really know what I was talking about when I told him I had a PVC enclosure. So I'm not sure what to do..
3. Feeding-- my bearded dragon hasn't eaten that I know of for quite awhile. I don't know what else to try. I've tried blueberries, spinach, romaine lettuce, crickets, dubia roaches, meal worms, king worms, mustard greens, kale, baby kale..
I'm just at a lose with this guy. I know it has something to with with the enclosure heating and everything, I just don't know what to do.
Someone please help, I'm so exhausted from worrying about him and about not knowing what to do. I feel like I got kind of ripped off and these people were just trying to up-sale me and make a sale.
Thank you

Oh no!! I'm sorry about your bad experience with the pet stores. I'll try to help out as I can:

1. Any sort of sand or loose substrate is a problem. Three major issues: it causes impaction, it can get into their eyes and cause infections, and it's practically impossible to sanitize so it breeds bacteria. The biggest indicator of impaction is not pooping for 7+ days and not eating; do you think your beardie might be impacted if they're not eating? What was the substrate the pet store kept their beardies on?

2. Beardies do not need any lights on (heat, UVB, or otherwise) during the night; it's generally recommended that they only get 14 hours of light per day. However, heating pads are not necessary either unless your house drops below 60 degrees F at night. Beardies sleep perfectly comfortably from 60F+

3. Make sure your beardie has a good basking temp at 95-115 degrees F (higher temp range for younger beardie) to aid in their digestion. However, if your beardie is impacted it's only going to do more harm to give them solid foods. For now, I recommend getting Fluker's Repta-boost (this is sold at my local Petco, so maybe it's sold at yours too) or getting Oxbow Critical Care to syringe-feed or eyedropper-feed them. It might just be relocation stress. How long have you had your beardie?

Also, I must ask: what kind of UVB are you using? Is it a long florescent tube, a coiled bulb, or a Mercury Vapor Bulb? If not an MVB, make sure that the UVB is 10% or 12%; UVB bulbs designed for nocturnal/tropical reptiles are at 5% or 6%, and do not provide nearly enough UVB that a desert reptile such as a beardie requires.

Let me know if any of this helps your little one! I hope they turn out okay and their appetite comes back.

Thank you so much for your reply!
1. I'm not positive what the pet store had him on, I wanna say sand but I'm not 100%. He hasn't pooped in like almost 3 weeks.

2. Ok, I'll start turning off the heat emitter at night and I won't use the heating pad, I can return that tomorrow.

3. When I go to return the heating pad I'll buy the repti-boost. I hope all this works. We have had him since April I think. The first couple months he was fine, he started becoming like this I wanna say 3 months ago where I started to have a hard time feeding him and I would go and ask the people at the pet store where I got him and they were zero help and I started to realize they didn't know what they were talking about.

The uvb I'm using is the zoo med 10.0 24".

Him not pooping in three weeks is indeed concerning, and points to impaction. Syringe-feeding pumpkin baby food will also help move things along in his stomach, as pumpkin is a natural gentle laxative. Getting a few drops of olive oil inside him will also move things along. The most important thing is only giving nutritious liquids from now on, making it easier for him to poop while still absorbing nutrients.

Do you keep him on sand, or was he on sand when he started not pooping? Or did he eat a lot of mealworms? These are the most common causes of impaction.

Also, it's good that your UVB bulb is 10.0; most people here would recommend the ReptiSun 10.0 or the Arcadia 12% instead of the ZooMed brand, so keep that in mind when it's time to replace the bulb (which is recommended every 6 months--and September is six months away from April). Since the ZooMed brand is a T8 bulb, make sure it's mounted underneath the mesh screen hood of your viv; I can provide pictures of an easy and free method I used if you'd like. Mesh screens filter out 30%-50% of UVB rays, depending on the bulb's brightness and the size of the mesh, and ZooMed isn't the most recommended UVB bulb to begin with. Your little guy is gonna need all the UVB and healthy nutrients he can get.

I hope he gets better. Keep us updated with him!