On thursday, Zola and I are going to stay at my mom's house til the end of January. It's my winter break from college and I really want to go home for a few weeks because I hardly ever see my family any more, plus I have lots to do. But anyway, I bought a pack of those "HotHands" hand warmers for two reasons. 1) I planned on wrapping a couple of them in a washcloth and using them as a heat source for the hour and half car ride. Also, there can be some pretty violent winter storms out there, and if the power went out, which is not that unlikely, I wanted to have a stash of emergency heat. But I want to make sure these are safe to use for snakes. They really don't seem any different than the heat packs snakes are shipped with, but I just want to make sure....

I dont intend to ever let them come in direct contact with the snake, I would wrap them in cloth first.

The ingredients are listed as iron powder, water, salt, activated charcoal, and vermiculite. Simple chemistry to create heat, but could any of these things be potentially harmful, even if the snake never comes in direct contact with them?

Just making sure, shoot me your opinions.

My mom does have a gas stove, so I could always heat water for hot water bottles if things got really desperate. I lived in that house for the majority of my life, I know that winter outages happen, so I just want to be prepared and have a plan. One winter, we couldn't even get up the driveway because it was so flooded, and another, the county advised everyone to stay off the roads because of falling tree limbs. It's not even civilized, I tell you!