Lowering humidity?

[Mort]

Seems like alot of people need help raising the humidity of their enclosure, but how do you lower it? Where I live, the humidity outside right now is 100% and it's been raining for a few days. With temps in the 70's, neither the A/C or heat has been turned on inside. The humidity inside my snakes' rubbermaid containers is 88-94%. I removed the water dish from the warm side and put on the cooler side. No difference. Removed the water dish all together... no change. Switched from cypress mulch to newspaper, and that lowered the humidity by about 2% for a little bit but the newspaper and walls of the rubbermaid were soaked within an hour. I was gonna add some more ventilation holes to the container, but I decided to check the room humidity before doing that. The humidity inside my house is 97% (at least according to the digital thermometer/hygrometer I use in the rubbermaid), so it's actually a bit lower inside the rubbermaids.

My ball just started a shed, so I'm not too concerned at the moment, but it definitely needs to be lowered soon. My Redtail Boa I am worried about, though.

How long can snakes be exposed to high humidity before you really have to start worrying about respiratory infections? The weather outside is supposed to be drying up some now that the rain has stopped, but I still won't need to use my air conditioning system for a while. Any suggestions?

[JLC]

I would be more concerned about scale rot than RI, if the substrate is consistently wet.

The only thing I can think of to try (that wouldn't cost an arm and a leg like a room AC) is a fan. If the air is constantly circulating through their enclosures, it may help lower the humidity, or at least dry out the substrate some. You could also put in more ventilation holes for these times when the humidity is so high (Not an unusual thing for Florida, I would guess!) and then cover them up with tape or something when you need to retain more moisture.

Hopefully, those with more experience micro-managing these mini-environments can offer some better advice!

[steelsack]

Man, that rubbermaid's gonna hold humidity til the end of time. If you want low humidity, go to a thrift store and pick up a used glass aquarium. Clean it out (duh!), get a screen top and a lamp and just watch the humidity plummet! If you're at around 100% often, then I'll bet you get it down to 45 or 50 in the tank without even trying! Maybe a ceramic heat emitter instead of a bulb since it's Florida.......
This is funny because everyone with a glass tank has had to go through lots of tweaking to get thier levels high enough while you could concievably use glass to decrease!
Hope you get it figured out. Play around with it but be sorta quick because IMO your current H level is way too high.

[Marla]

In Florida you're not likely to ever have much of a battle to get the humidity up, so what I'd suggest is either switching to glass, mesh, and lamp like steelsack suggested, or make more ventilation holes in the container and buy a dehumidifier ($200 for a fancy electric one, $5 for a tub of absorbent stuff -- see Amazon, especially under Sports) and keep it in the room with the door shut most of the time.