Ha ha - that's exactly what our hammy did at first - avoid the scary ladder and climb the back bars to the shelf. Once they build a bit of confidence they zoom up and down it.
The little bowl in the corner of the shelf is interesting -hopefully yours won't use it as a toilet like ours did. Because the bowl lifts out I (and Coco had this too) kept finding he had removed it with his teeth to see what was underneath lol- and would then go under the shelf to look up and see what it was like from that end - inquisitive little things
When ours started using it as a toilet I was advised to put his litter tray over the top and give him a separate food bowl nearby. That worked. Except - because of the hump on the shelf,whenever he got in the toilet and then reached for his water bottle he ended up aquaplaning down the shelf in the toilet - which he seemed to quite enjoy so kept doing it and then found the bowl underneath was still there so kept lifting it out again. Endless entertainment haha.
They all have different personalities and yours might be more sensible and pee on the substrate in a corner. Yes usually you can see reasonably quickly where they are peeing by the wet substrate - although sometimes, they are quite clean and put more substrate on top to keep the smelldown and sortof bury it. So it can take a while - but don't worry about it. If you can't smell it, don't worry, that's my motto.
When you do find where it is you can move the litter tray there. Then you can see when it needs emptying - the Chinchilla sand soaks up the pee quite well reducing any odour. If you have potty litter granules just keep an eye out in case he tries to eat them as the granules are very bad for them. Ours tried it once but sensibly spat it out again. I ended up switching to chinchilla bathing sand which is what most people use.
The 8.5" comfort wheel is fine - wait and see how big he grows. For an average syrian an 11" wheel is usually best as they run so much better in one and are guaranteed to have a straight back and run in the right position. If a hammy grows particularly large (not usual with pet shop hamsters and girls often bigger than boys) then they can even need a 12" wheel. Our last syrian grew huge and weighted 225g. The average is between 135g and 180g. Even the 11" wodent wheel wasn't quite big enough for him. The 11" wood wheel was - because it was 29cm instead of 28cm diameter - it just made that bit of difference.
All sounds good with the substrate in the new cage. 6" should fill the base so you might want to compress it down a bit when adding the old on top so it doesn't fall out of the bars too much.
That is so strange - maybe my eyes are playing tricks - it actually looks like a grey small hamster in the stainless steel bowl lol. Seeing hamsters everywhere
