Emergency!!

Somehow, while I was gone tonight, my ceramic heating element got turned off. No idea how this happened, but I got home and his ambient temp is 64.8! How do I warm it up? He is moving, (thank god) and I just got a secondary lamp to plug in, (unfortunately this one gives off light AND heat. I got the element working again (it wasn't unplugged, and the power strip was on???)

Please help. I need quick reptile friendly ways to warm up his tank, that don't require me going to the store (all of which are closed until Friday!)

Hopefully someone with more experience will give you something more substantial than this but depending on his enclosure I know that every time i've fed my BP I use a hair dryer to dry his mouse off, and just from the residual airflow going into his tank, his temps kick up by like 10 degrees. If you have one, blow it around in there (make sure he has a full water bowl to keep humidity from bottoming out, but even if it drops for the few minutes you're heating up, it'll rectify afterwards)

not a perfect solution, but it works, and quickly, until you get his ambient temps up.

Do you have a space heater? To get him warmed up initially, you could just hold him for a bit

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Originally Posted by MontyAndMelissa

Somehow, while I was gone tonight, my ceramic heating element got turned off. No idea how this happened, but I got home and his ambient temp is 64.8! How do I warm it up? He is moving, (thank god) and I just got a secondary lamp to plug in, (unfortunately this one gives off light AND heat. I got the element working again (it wasn't unplugged, and the power strip was on???)

Please help. I need quick reptile friendly ways to warm up his tank, that don't require me going to the store (all of which are closed until Friday!)

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Take him to a spare room and raise the room temp up to around 80 or more and he will be fine for a while. just try to reduce temperature fluctuation.

P.S. obviously don't blow it directly on him, just sort of around the enclosure to spread the hot airflow around. You should see immediate rises in temperature. Once it hits the range you need, stop; the ceramic should get the ambient temps back up in time for the blow dryer air to dissipate out.

My temperatures are usually fine. No fluctuation, (no more than .2 degrees. ) steady and good. I held him for a few minutes as his tank warmed up. Its still slowly raising (I added a "back up" lamp. Its a desk lamp that gets pretty hot (112). I unfortunately don't have a space heater. But while I was holding him I dropped his heat lamp lower into the tank (to warm it faster) and that seemed to have worked. Ambient is up to 76.6.

Before I go to sleep I will make sure that the temperatures stay steady, and I'm plugging the Che directly into the wall so there is no room for error.

Glad to see the issue resolving; normally temps are pretty easy to raise quickly. The important part was just making sure the snake is comfortable and functional in the meantime.

Just set it up as you had it with the che running as it was before it was turned off. Let it warm up on its own and not plugged into the wall unless that's how it was. The worst thing you could do is go from being too cold to too hot or even cause a burn.

Relax and make sure everything as it should be and you will be fine.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MontyAndMelissa

Somehow, while I was gone tonight, my ceramic heating element got turned off. No idea how this happened, but I got home and his ambient temp is 64.8! How do I warm it up? He is moving, (thank god) and I just got a secondary lamp to plug in, (unfortunately this one gives off light AND heat. I got the element working again (it wasn't unplugged, and the power strip was on???)

Please help. I need quick reptile friendly ways to warm up his tank, that don't require me going to the store (all of which are closed until Friday!)

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What kind of ceramic heater did you have and what temp did you have it set at? I have a lasko ceramic space heater and I had it set at 83 (we were having a really cold spell that temperature kept the ambient temp in the enclosure at 80). Well one night I walked into the snake room to check on the snake and realized the thermostat on the heater read 76 and wasn't going up. So I put my hand against the heater only to find that it was blowing cold air. Turns out there is a built-in safety mechanism that causes the heating element to turn off if the internal mechanisms overheat. The remedy (according to the information manual) was to unplug the heater for at least 10 minutes, then plug it back in. Sure enough, that fixed my issue. Now I have the heater set at 78 and I have towels wrapped around my snake's enclosure to help insulate it. It has been almost a month and it hasn't overheated since then, and the ambient air temp inside the snake's enclosure hovers between 79-80.