As long as the hot spot is on one end and there is a cool side the snake will not sit on it and burn itself. They are not like iguanas in that aspect which should rely on the sun or above heat source to fully warm up the whole body and not just one section. iguanas will burn themselves on a hot rock or heat pad. Not colubrids..



What snakes do in the wild is search for the perfect temps and humidity. They like it as cold as 55F to conserve and a hot spot of over 100f. If you can offer the gradient by keeping the cage in a cold room and the unit it is big enough so that the heat does not warm up the other side.Is pefect. But hardly what we find is the situation in keeping tehse at home. So adjustments are neccessary.-





In your case i would do two things. i am sure your room is not 55F. so the above suggestion is not really practical for most snake rooms. So get a temp gun and see what the cold side is and the hot side. Does the snake have a way to get down to room temp on the cold side? If not.. then that means you need to get a rhoestat for the heat pad and turn it down some. You don't want it heating the whole cage unit so that the sanke can'y get away and conserve energy on the cold side inbetween meals..







What mine do is they sit on the cold side until i feed them. Then they move over to the warm side to pick the perfect temp for digestion. this sometimes involves them moving a bit back and forth so they can adjust the temps required for the different parst of the digetstion process (yes they varies and change temsp during the disgestion process to). Then when they are done they move back to the cold side to conserve calories until their next meal. Snakes do this because they are geared for survival. So no worries on one sitting on a 120F heat pad and cooking itself. Because they won't!



Just offfer a good temp range from one end to the other. The greater the temp range the healtheir it is for the snake.



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