Reptile & Amphibian Forums

hi i m a novice when it comes to taking care of corn snakes. i have a glass 10 gallon aquarium and a small repto med heating pad. heating pad is way too hot. can someone give me some tips?

is to attach the heating pad to a ceramic tile of the appropriate size. Put the tile on a heatproof item (not wood). Put the tank on top of the tile. Now you can raise or lower the tile or tank to reduce or increase the heat output. You can also use a rheostat (available at Petco or Petsmart), which acts like a dimmer for lights to decrease your heat. Make sure to put an accurate thermometer directly on top of the hot spot to get a reading of how hot it actually is.

Of course, the most effective (and generally most expensive) way is to put the heating pad on a thermostat.
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phflame
kingsnake.com host

Go to home depot or Lowes or most hardware stores buy a lamp dimmer (its same thing but 1/4 the price as the reptile type Rheos). They come in white or beige .
Plug the UTH to that and the lamp dimmer gets plugged into the wall outlet you simply set it on high-middle-low and anything between that and thats it.
It will keep the UTH from overheating or not heating enough its same thing as Rheo way cheaper and to me looks nicer. Mine have run for yrs and have kept temps EXACTLY how I want .

thank you!! i think i will buy a lamp dimmer until i can get a thermostat.

As an electrical engineer, I can say that simply substituing a lamp dimmer for a rheostat is NOT as easy as it sounds. Typically, a lamp dimmer is designed for controlling lamps: ie: a low wattage device. An UTH, heat lamp, or ceramic heating elements are designed specifically to create heat and as such are higher wattage devices.

While a lamp dimmer will work at the onset, (even years) but it more than likely is being overloaded by the heat device and over time will inevitably fail. While it is true that a modern house panel has protective devices that should prevent any catastrophies in this instance (fuses)

I would not gamble on this and would just spend the extra $$ now and get a thermostat that has been specifically designed for the pet trade. I personally have purchased two of these recently, and they were both about $34. In my book this is reasonable.

Don't play games with electricity! You'll always lose!