Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I was reading the instructions for my ReptiTherm UTH last night. I'm using it on a 10g aquarium, and the instructions say not to use it with less than an inch of substrate because it can burn the snake. What about people who use newspaper or paper towels...what do you use for heat? I couldn't find aspen (or anything that wasn't cedar or pine) last weekend, so unless I can get it somewhere before I get my snake, I'm going to end up using one of those two for awhile.

i use UTH on all my tanks. i just lay a few layers of newspaper down then reptile bark. with my python i just have newspaper over her UTH area so i lay it pretty thick. if your just housing a baby corn till it needs a bigger tank you can use a human heat pad. i've been using one with my new baby corn in a 5 gallon tank set on low. only have the tank setting on 1/4-1/3 of the heat pad. inside i have a piece of that green carpet then paper towels. this is working for me fine.

well you do have a thermostat (preferably a porportional) or a rheostat on that, corrrect? I use just blacklight heating bulbs for my glass tanks - I don't feel I could get a high enough ambient air temp in the tank with a UTH.

also, a tip that a lot of people seem to do is go down and buy yourself just a single porcelain tile and sticfk the tile to that - that way you can move it tank to tank.
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-Chris

The reason mainstream thought is thought of as a stream is because it's so shallow. -George Carlin

A fool doesn't learn. A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. Which one are you?

My Website
N. American Rat/Corn snake care sheet I wrote
Information on substrates

Current snakes:
0.1 Licorice Stick Black Rat (Lola)
1.0 Black Rat (Frankie)
0.1 Texas Bairdi (Rosa)
0.1 Blue Beauty (Brunhilde)
1.0 Green Tree Python (Monty)

I really like that tile idea, and since I haven't stuck mine on yet, I might try that out. I keep seeing all these warnings on the UTH about letting it "breathe" so it doesn't overheat. How would you work that with a tile?