Adventures in Snake Housing

[WrongPython]

Figured I'd start my own thread à la jmcrook's since there will a good amount of caging/housing upgrades here in the relatively near future. My hope is that this thread will allow others to learn from my experiences and plan their own snake housing accordingly.

Caging, heating, and lighting have been on my mind a lot lately. My longicauda is approaching the need for a housing upgrade, my Papuan carpet needs one, and I'm falling out of love with my Sonoran's heating and lighting situation. Said Sonoran used to be under an Arcadia Deep Heat Projector (DHP) before being moved into a 4'x2'x2' with an RHP. Since the move, she's been spending a far longer time basking -- she'll park herself on her basking shelf for days at a time sometimes-- and I feel like she could have more energy than she does. She almost feels like a pet rock some days, and a boa shouldn't feel like that!

After quite a bit of recent research into snake heating and lighting, I've come to believe my Sonoran's lethargy stems from inadequately intense heating. While her RHP can bring her up to temperature, the IR-C heat it gives only goes skin-deep, and doesn't really penetrate her tissues to get her warm. Great for maintaining minimum ambient temperatures, but not for proper basking. It's more or less the same deal for my little Papuan carpet's heat mat. For what it's worth, the longicauda's DHP doesn't seem to be the best sole heat source either. While the heat it gives off is more penetrating, snakes just aren't as cued in to the IR-B it predominantly gives off as much as IR-A. So, the DHP seems better off as a nighttime heat backup or a complement to an IR-A predominant heat source (ie. a halogen basking bulb), and not as a sole heat source.

With all of that in mind, I've come up with a new housing plan that I should be able to enact soon. Said plan is 4'x2'x2's for everyone with full spectrum heating and lighting -- UV lights and dimmable halogen basking spots at a minimum, with the possibility of a DHP as complementary/backup heating and JungleDawn LEDs to fill out the snake-visible light spectrum. The 4' Evolution cages from Maximum Reptile look like they'll do the job quite nicely on the new caging front given a bit of baby snake-proofing. In the meantime, I'm going to be reaching out to the manufacturer of my Sonoran's cage to see if they'd be able to provide me a screen that matches her cage's design. That way, I can retrofit her cage for an external heat bulb mount and avoid raising temperatures too much by having the bulb mounted to the ceiling inside the cage.

...well that turned into a bit of a ramble, haha. Wish me luck y'all -- hopefully I'll have some sweet new snake cages to show off soon!