Getting humidity to go down in tubs?

[icygirl]

Hello all,

About a week ago both my corn and my ball got moved into these great 27qt sterilite tubs (they are around 5.5" tall) that I got for $5.79 a piece. Really good deal and perfectly sized tubs! I figure I may have to move Caspie to a slightly larger tub when she grows a bit more (she's around 3 feet long now) but for now it seems perfect for her.

Anywho. A couple days afterwards, the humidity really was spiking. Both of their tanks were around 85% humidity on their Acu-rites. I thought, maybe I spilled water in their tubs, or maybe they urinated, or something - so to be sure I stripped both of their tanks and made sure their water bowls were on the cool side. The next day the humidity was still around 85% - no change.

So yesterday I drilled a LOT more holes in the top and sides of their tubs to allow more air exchange. This helped, and now their humidity levels are around 75%. However this is still too high, and I'm just afraid of bad sheds/scale rot/URI's that can come from this. Can anybody give me a good way to lower humidity? Or should I just keep drilling a million holes? It just seems silly and I can't recall seeing anybody's tubs looking like swiss cheese.

Also, some good info to know: BP's substrate is newspaper, and corn's substrate is aspen. BP temps are in upper 80's on hot side, corns are in lower 80's on hot side. Both have water bowls that are on the cool side. Both are on flexwatt that covers around half of the tubs, which are controlled by Ranco thermostats...

[Fenderplayer104]

i don't think to much humidity is such a bad thing as long as the substate isnt soaking wet. you don't want scale rot.. i have herd of the people who live in florida and there humidity is 90 constant and there ball pythons are just fine .. i may be terribly wronge though.

[Kagez28]

too much humidity can cause problems for a snake, so it is probably best to bring that humidity down.

the more holes the better... but if your tub is starting to look like a colander it's time to stop. you could try and use a substrate that might absorb some of the humidity, like aspen. you can keep the newspaper maybe just throw some handfuls of aspen in. you could also try using a screen in for the top of the tub. you can use a knife to cut a big hole in the lid, and get some mosquito netting cut to size. i used to do this to add a heat lamp to the tub (this will also help cut the humidity).

hope this helps.

[ChrisBowsman]

^ If you cut a hole in the lid, keep the piece that you cut out, and use it like an aperture to control the humidity.

[icygirl]

^ If you cut a hole in the lid, keep the piece that you cut out, and use it like an aperture to control the humidity.

Hey, that isn't a bad idea. But then how would you re-attach the cutout if, say the humidity went down too low? It would be neat to have a small sliding door above some mesh... though I'm not too savvy on how I'd do something like that...

By the way, I know this is in the BP forum, but does anyone know if it's more dangerous for my corn's humidity to be this high? I understand corns generally need less humidity than balls do.

And may I add... I much prefer dealing with high humidity issues than my old low humidity headache! I had such a hard time with bumping humidity up when I used to use glass tanks and heat lamps. Sort of strange being on the other side of things, lol.

[Ginevive]

Melting holes into the sides of the tub with a hot soldering iron, is what I do If more humidity is needed later, I just fold the newspaper substrate so that it covers some of the holes, and spray it into place with my water-spray-bottle.

[josh@outbackreps]

I have the same problem when I set up our last snake room with RBI racks. We used them with the heat tape that's built in. We had really bad humidity, so I when I was talking to Neil Golli who sells the racks too, he said the problem was due to the temp difference between the outside air and rack temp. We have always heated our rooms with space heaters and don't use heat tape, once we put a heater in to raise the ambient temp to about 75-78* the problem went away. (Being in Maine its always cold, heat on or not)

If you can find a way to get the tubs in a warmer area with a higher outside/room temp the problem will go away without having to modify the boxes to much.

Hope this helps.

[Brimstone111888]

I wish I could raise my heat lol. I live on the water in south florida with about 100 holes in each tub. I still never see my humidity go below 70% and every snake has been fine now for almost a year.