Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Okay, lemme give a little background info. I have a young Brazilian rainbow boa who I was keeping in a glass tank. Of course I couldn't keep the humidity where it needed to be so I moved her to a plastic tub and all my problems were solved.

But now I have an issue with heat because as we all know, plastic melts. I was considering cutting a hole in the top, lining it with a wire netting, and putting the heat lamp over that. As for the heat pad, I was going to find a thin piece of glass or ceramic and attach the pad to that, then tape the whole getup to the bottom of the cage.

I bought a thermostat forever ago and the darned thing broke. I've been keeping my ball python for four years without one and have had no problems with it exploding or bursting into flames. He has never been burned by it, but I make sure there's a good layer of aspen between him and the heat pad.

Any other suggestions?

You can attach or slip a heat pad under the plastic box and use an ordinary plug-in style lamp dimmer to control the heat output. This is acceptable but not precise. It will keep the temp to non-harmful levels but makes it tough to hold a certain temperature when your ambient room temp changes. It is cheap and will work. Use a thermometer to find out the useful range of the dimmer, then mark it with a sharpie so you know where to set the dimmer. The desired setting will be different when the room is, say 80 deg, compared to when the room is say 70 deg.

They sell herp ON/OFF controllers for $40 that are fine. You can even plug the dimmer into one of those. Then you can use the dimmer and the thermostat will shut it off if the temp gets too high. This is a great, affordable and simple setup.

Without a dimmer, a nice way to control heat is to elevate the box over the heat pad. During Summer, you might want 1/4 inch or more of space. During Winter, maybe just a hair of space. Tile makes a very nice heat distributor and buffer. You can put tile in the cage with heat pad under the box to buffer the heat some.

I did the screen idea with heat lamp. The cage is heated under with a heat pad. I used flet spacers to elevate the box a little. The lamp is only 15 watts. It was Winter and I needed just a little extra air temp in there.