What we are learning DHP CER

[Lomu]

Hi everyone, I posted recently asking for help with placing the probe. I can't remember if I had another post asking for help but wanted to create this post on what we have learnt so far with DHP and CER lamps.

Thank you to everyone who patiently walked that road of trying to sort out the ambient tempreture in our vivs.

We live in the UK so it's cold in winter. We have a very cold house and the corn snake is kept in his wooden viv under the BP wooden viv. We followed advice and swapped the 2 so that the BP was on top. Our vivs are 3 foot long.

We started off with a 50w in the corn and 80w with the BP. We had Arcadia DHP. The struggle to get the ambient temp on the cool side right was not working.

We then decided to explore a new area next to us and pop into the reptile petshop there. This is what he explained to us.

We needed to have the lamps halfway between the one glass and in the middle of the ceiling. He explained that the probe needed to be along the wall parallel to the heat source on the back wall. This is because the dimmer will spend all the time dimming under the heat source because the temp was being reached the whole time. By having it where he said it should be allows the dimmer to regulate better.

We are no experts and this post is to share what we have found to work.

We then placed the hot hide away from the lamp so that it wasn't directly under it to allow the heat source to reach 32c and his closest hide to reach 30c.

We had him on a arcadia dhp but had done research and have ordered a prorep dhp 80w because the heat radius is wider. We have him on a ceramic lamp at the moment because the petshop owner told us that dhp has a very concentrated heat source and doesn't allow for ambient to be reached on the cold side. This makes sense. Right now we have achieved the ambient temp on both sides. It fluctuates between ambient on the walls 28c to 29c then on the cold side 24c to 26c.

Our corn is still on the 80w dhp from arcadia and we have also managed to meet the ambient temp of 30c in his hot hide which we moved away from under the heat source to 22c to 24c on the cold side.

When the prorep dhp comes we are going to test it with our corn to see if it improves the gradient. We are not sure if we will then swap out the ceramic for the prorep dhp.

It isnt possible for a cold home in a cold country to assist with keeping an ambient gradient down to 24 to 26c if we didn't do the above.

I am not saying that what we have done above is correct. I was really excited to share with you what we have found. It's been quite stressful because we care about our animals and want them to be healthy and happy.

I can send pics if you want me to. We also bought a digital stick on thermometer which we placed in the cold side and it is very accurate along with our gun.

[Bogertophis]

Pics would be great too, thanks. What works for some doesn't work the same for everyone, everywhere. More input here is bound to help others in a similar situation.

[Lomu]

Have attached pictures of both bp and corn snake. We added some fake plants which helped boost up the temp and added some more cover into BP viv. Happy with the temps. Cold side on 24C for bp and cornsnake around 21c with his high coconut at 25c. Humidity 40 to 50...as good as its going to get. They both have humid hides.

We have bp on the ceramic bulb 80w and cornsnake on the dhp 80w Arcadia. We want to try the prorep 80w dhp but need a bigger guard. Interested to see if it gives a higher gradient than the arcadia which has a smaller area of heat. Can then have both snakes on dhp.

First set of pictures is of the corn snake
Second set is of the bp

Bp has moved more around his viv using hot, middle and cold hides. He also has eaten at each meal and is active daily at night which is great to see. Waiting for bp first shed. The digital thermometer on the cold side behind the ivy is so accurate. In hindsight we should have just bought 2 of those per viv instead of all the cords. We were also told that white python digital thermometer brand is good as well.

We have found that placing the probes away from the heat source has helped keep the heat balanced. The logic of stopping constant dimming makes sense when placing it directly underneath heat source.

It was interesting to hear from the reptile shop owner that his bp in the shop at the the moment had an ambient of 26c across the viv and we noticed that our bp enjoys his middle hide where the ambient is 26c. We didn't buy him from that shop so it couldn't be that he was used to the temp. Interesting to see how it was the same.



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[Lomu]

Bp pictures

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[Lomu]

Last few of corn snake viv

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[Homebody]

Great set ups! You're learning quickly.

[Bogertophis]

Great set ups! You're learning quickly.

That's for sure!