So with our two new adult boa additions, Beks and I have been looking at caging options and decided to go with a couple of VE-175 tubs for the time being. Now in our house, it gets pretty cold in the winter and heating is always an issue for our snakes in tubs (usually involving insulating racks and using space heaters for the cold months).

Since we eventually plan to get some nice PVC cages for our boas (probably two 6x2x2s), I was thinking of buying a couple of 120 watt RHPs from RBI now and mounting them on the inside of the lids of the VE175s. This would provide a hot spot as well as ambient temps and I prefer RHPs in general for heating my snakes.

Has anyone done this? Any downsides to think about?

Considering the tub is 14" tall and I use RHPs in my 11" tall T8, I'm not too worried about accidental contact as they won't get hot enough to instantly burn the snake. Mounting the tstat probe should be easy as I can melt a hole about half way up and just fish the probe in and secure it with tape on the outside so it doesn't wind up on the floor of the tub.

Then when we get our PVC enclosures I can easily move the RHPs to them and keep the 175s as quarantine or backups.