Reptile & Amphibian Forums

My old UTH in my bigger cage shorted out and slightly burned my Cal king (some belly wrinkling.) After that happened, I put Houdini in a different cage and put a piece of plexi and a brick over the UTH to keep it in the mid-high 80s. When I got home Yesterday the room was hot because it was a warm day. I put a thermometer on the brick and it read 95 degrees. The wrinkling now looks a little worse.

I find this very alarming for a couple reasons. I was paying attention and the snake still got burned. Also I have two baby hog island boas arriving in a couple days, I don't want this happening to them.

The brick seemed to make it too sensitive to room temp. Is a good UTH supposed to maintain constant temp without a thermostat when the temperature changes 15 degrees or so? How does a thermostat work on a small stick on UTH? Any recommendations or other UTH options?

What about the snake? I can conveniently have a vet check it out in a week at the local reptile group meeting, should I do anything in the meantime? The room is warming to the low-mid 80s lately so now I'm only turning the UTH on for a couple hours in the morning when it's cool.

Heat pads cannot maintain constant temperature when the background air temp in the room fluctuates - that would require electronics and/or programming, and as you know, UTHs don't have any of that.

Put some Neosporin on the snake's belly by the way.

Use a dimmer at the least. You'll have to constantly adjust it, but a low-to-mid setting is usually fine. You can get a plug-in tabletop dimmer at Home Depot for around $13.00.

Another idea would be to get a good thermostat (the new ESU models are very good and not alot of $$$) to sense the air temp. Your Cal king doesn't need the UTH on when the air temp is above 78. So, buffer the UTH with tile or a brick, then have the thermostat shut it off when the air temp in the cage/room gets 78.

For the boas, I wouldn't even use UTH. Better to use (in my opinion) overhead heat and a thermostat or two. Belly heat dries out anything on it (and boas need some humidity). Overhead heat dries out the air but not the floor area where the boa is, and a large water bowl can offset the air drying. I think overhead heat gives you much more control. You can have 2 bulbs in the cage - one very low wattage for one side, and a little higher for the other depending on the size of the cage. You can use a dimmer on the larger bulb, and use a thermostat on the whole thing. That's what I do, because in Winter, a cold cage with a hot heat pad gets you nowhere with boas.

If you do not use a thermostat with boas, you are in for trouble. They aren't good at sensing what is too hot, especially belly heat. Where they come from, the temp range is very narrow, and the ground is often a tad cooler than the air.
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Mark

Printed and filed for future reference.

You can also put a light timer in the system so your under the tank heater will turn off in the heat of the day, and comes back on in the eve. They run from 4$ to 15$ at any hardware store depending on if you need a U ground plug or not.
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rbichler

the kingsnake's cage, and the box rack with thermostat I'm looking into for the boas. It's still in the mid 80s in here at 9:00PM.