Question for those who use wood shavings

[interloc]

Hello. I don't know if its because its late or I'm a little slow but I have a question. Right now I am using paper towels as substrate. It's not a big deal I guess. Doesn't look nice or anything. It does its job. Whenever I look on threads I see people using aspen or other kinds of wood and it looks much nicer and I've heard it's easier to keep clean. I'm looking to maybe make the switch to aspen.

My question is about heat. With the paper towels, I just point my temp gun at the towel and it says 90 and I'm like happy days! With aspen the temp would be different because the aspen is thicker than paper towel. So do I adjust the temperature up to compensate for the thickness? Or do I leave it where it is because the bottom of the bin will still be 90 like it was with the paper towel and the snake will "nest" in the aspen and get closer to the heat tape? I hope that makes sense.

Also if you could give me some pros and cons of using wood as opposed to paper towels, that would be awesome! Thanks guys/gals

[Evildrdee]

I like aspen shavings. They absorb lots of fluids(good for swimmer snakes) The wide curl shavings over the shredded sticks. But, the last bag I got of it came with wood mites. Oh and how they love the grape vine branches. I know they dont bug the snakes but they are buggin me. I may have to throw out the entire bag, bake all my branches, and put them on paper towels. So theres my pros and cons.

[The Serpent Merchant]

You have to balance substrate thickness with thermostat set temperature. You will need to bump up your thermostat a few degrees. Basically try to keep the floor of the cage 95 or below, while making the top of the substrate 90. I have found that substrate layers need to stay under 1/2" thick for this to work.

Pros:

+ looks
+ easier to spot clean
+ absorbent
+ odor absorption/masking properties

Cons:

- cost
- harder to do a complete cage cleaning
- can make a mess everywhere
- harder to maintain proper temps

[DooLittle]

My balls are on paper towels, pro- ease of cleaning! My boas are on aspen. And they will burrow or shove aside the aspen and get right to the bottom. Aspen looks nice, but is a bigger pain to clean.

Sent from my ADR6410LVW using Tapatalk 2

[Mike41793]

I don't like the idea of spot cleaning personally so i use newspaper.

[Artemille]

I stopped using wood chips when cleaning days were giving me splinters. I wasn't using aspen though. Sheets of blank newsprint are easily accessible to me in bulk, so I go with that. You get over the aesthetic appeal real quick.