Quote Originally Posted by Moosefriend View Post

@Usa: Thanks! I've been reading a lot since my friend got a BP just about two weeks ago. There was a second at the store that got returned because the owners charred his mouth with a skillet-cooked rat. He's in isolation until he's better, and I want to adopt him and give him a better start.

@Coluber: What is a RHP? And, a UTH on the side will heat the ambient air better than a lamp - which will draw up all the moisture? Ok, that seems fair!

Holy crap, someone actually fed their snake prey hot enough to burn its bleeping mouth?!? Good thing that person doesn't have the snake anymore!

Re. Lamps: It's not really the lamp that draws up the moisture; it's the wide open area of screen the lamp needs to shine through. Normally, if the humidity in a tank with a screen top is too low, you just cover up more and more of the screen until it isn't. That may well mean covering the entire screen and just leaving a couple of small holes for ventilation. If you have a lamp sitting on top of the screen, you can't cover it all up because you have to leave it open where the lamp is. Heat is heat; but if your heat source requires you to leave a big hole for the moisture to escape through, it will dry out your enclosure. Radiant heat panels are mounted on the inside and don't get hot enough to burn; a UTH is on the outside, but it works by heating the glass, and glass is airtight. So it can be independent of how much ventilation you have.

As long as you can control how much ventilation there is (i.e, cover some holes if the humidity is too low), aspen can be just fine for humidity. Lots of people also use paper towels, newsprint, etc, and those things hold less moisture than anything. There are plenty of good substrates, and as long as you don't have an uncovered open screen top, humidity shouldn't *have* to be the reason for using or not using any of them.