I've been dabbling in python breeding for several years now, with a few successful babies hatched, but the part that has always confounded me is incubation. I love pythons (balls and bloods) but the incubation aspect has always made me contemplate throwing in the towel and buying a bunch of boas.

This year, I thought I had a fail-proof incubator -- I built it out of a perfectly-sized dead minifridge, hooked it up to a good proportional thermosdat, and even added a fan to circulate the air. Very quickly, we discovered that it was overheating in the extreme heat waves the northeast got this year, so we moved it to the basement. This worked for awhile but eventually the basement heated up, too (not exceedingly so, mind you -- never greater than 78F or so) and the 'bator started to cook again.

Towards the end, the ambient temp in the basement was ~77F, but the incubator was pushing 95-97F consistently despite my eventually unplugging the heat source entirely. (I would open the door a crack to cool it down, which sometimes worked but sometimes made it TOO cool ) What baffled me even more was that after the few babies that made it were safely removed and whisked away to their tubs, the (now empty) thing soared to 100F despite ambient temps being no more than 78F, and no heat source plugged in at all.

My thought for this upcoming season is to upgrade to a larger 'fridge in the hopes that a bigger space will hold the temps more stable ... But I'm still very concerned.

Has anyone ever dealt with this before? What do all y'all do in even hotter parts of the country?