help with Hibernation

[Guest]

Hello everyone, this is a great forum. I have gotten a lot of information of all your posts! I just got my Argentine B&W tegu on Wednesday. It was a little colder than expected on the delivery day, in the 60's. The reason I say this is that the new tegu went under the basking lamp and warmed up for a while once in the enclosure and after getting warm started to explore the cage. I feed it that night, it ate about a golf ball sized ball of ground turkey and some eggs left over from my daughters breakfast(plain eggs, no salt/pepper or anything). It went to bed before the lights went out. This morning curiosity just got the best of me and I went looking for him. I know that I shouldn't go digging for him. He came up, warmed up for a bit and He ate a pinkie rat and 2 super worms and a large cricket. After having a bowel movement and basking for a couple minutes he burried himself again. Now to get to off my history with him and to the point. I believe that he is showing hibernation signs with being burrowed for the whole day. My concern is I have barely seen any of him and I am not completely sure if he is healthy.
I have seen that you only need to let them hibernate if they are breeding. Also to keep them from hibernation I have read just keeping the lights on for 12 hours and temps warm they won't. Then I read that if they want to hibernate they will and nothing will stop them. I do not want to keep him from hibernating all I want to do is keep him from hibernating for a couple weeks so I can observe him and make sure he is healthy. So are there any sure fire ways to keep him up?
about the setup:
He is just over a month old, in a 40 gal breeder. I have uvb 10.0 on the warm side, a basking spot of a little over 100F. warm side is around 90-95, cool is 80, night warm drops into mid 80's and cool into high 70s. Humidity maintains around 65-70%. He has a couple inches of aspen as a substrate. Any help would be great! Thank you.
here is a picture of him.

 

[VARNYARD]

First off, Aspen is not a good substrate for tegus, it molds very fast. Second, if your tegu decides to hibernate, there is not too much you can do about it. You can keep the lights on for 12 hours a day, and try to keep him up, but if he has his mind set, he will try to sleep regardless of what you do.

 

[slideaboot]

Bobby, how do you feel about shredded redwood as a substrate? Somebody on here recommended to me for my extreme, saying that a really solid varanid keeper used it successfully. Then I heard from a few people that redwood was harmful to tegus. I've been using eco-earth ever since because cypress mulch is practically non-existent here in northern California. But I've also read from a few folks on here that eco-earth has been known to cause impaction.

Substrate is the only issue that I just can't seem to get full on top of and it's getting pretty frustrating.

Any insight? Thanks again.