Heating

Ok as of right now i have two lamps and a UTH with a bad therm/humid gauge. My one lamp is a heat lamp and the other is a light. The UTH is one that you cant change the temp higher or lower but it isnt too hot i checked. Now i want to replace the UTH for something more accurate and able to control and i was told i dont need a light but i dont know if thats true or not or should i switch it for another heat lamp or something. Also i need a temp/humid gauge with a probe and i assume a couple more temp gauges? Can someone give me some links and/or info for those materials for what i should use. Thanks!

Your UTH needs a thermostat, they can and will get hot enough to kill your snake.

Here are some good thermostats stay away from the junk sold in pet stores!

Budget: http://www.amazon.com/Hydrofarm-MTPR.../dp/B000NZZG3S

Mid-Range: http://www.reptilebasics.com/ranco-etc-111000-pre-wired

Best: http://spyderrobotics.com/home/products.html

You also need a good probed thermometer. UTH's do not increase the temperature of the air in a cage so Without a probed thermometer you can't tell how hot it actually is.

You can get this at Walmart, it costs $12 and measures 2 temperatures as well as humidity. (The probe goes on the floor of the hot side directly over the UTH and the unit sits on the cool side)

http://i1186.photobucket.com/albums/...nt/photo-3.jpg

If the room that the cage is on stays above 75 degrees the UTH is all you need, but if it drops below 75 degrees you will need a heat lamp to increase the temperature of the air in the cage to 80 degrees. I suggest infrared heat lamps as they can be left on 24/7.

Checkout this thread on cage heating: http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...t-Thermometers

Thank you. What kind of UTH should i use and how do i hook up a thermometer to control tye temps or just it just hook up quickly? I dont wanna use a on/off thermometer i wanna make sure everything works well.

You are confusing 2 different things,

A thermoSTAT is a device that uses a temperature probe to regulate a heat source to a set temperature

A thermoMETER is a device that measures temperature.

I use the Herpstat line of thermostats (proportional) on all of my cages exclusively. They aren't cheap but they are extremely accurate and have multiple layers of safety. The herpstat intro would work for you and only costs $99.

The UTH that you have now will be fine. All UTH's are just resistive heating elements (something that heats up when electricity is passed through it) Some are higher quality than others but they all require a thermostat.

All you have to do to hook up a thermostat to a UTH is tape the thermostat's temperature probe to the UTH, plug the UTH into the outlet on the thermostat, then set the thermostat to the temperature that you want the UTH to stay at.

Sounds easy enough haha thank you.