I bought a package of the Eco Earth compressed coconut substrate after I started having shed issues... and now I can't get the humidity down to an acceptable level. Before I get into that, let me start from the beginning.

I live in San Diego, so weather shouldn't be a big issue... but for some reason, I started having shed issues 2 months ago. I have no idea what happened, as I didn't change substrates or any other part of my husbandry, I just had 4 of my 7 snakes have bad sheds. I don't really subscribe to the "soak them in the tub and rub them down" mentality. If they have a bad shed, I will make sure that it isn't impacting them in any way (no eye-caps, etc)... and let them have the "dead skin" stay there until the next shed. As they started to go into shed the next cycle, I made sure to spray them down 2-3 times during the week leading up to the shed... and none of them had good sheds AGAIN. At this point, I wanted to make sure that they were all able to get the dead skin off, so I soaked those who still had issues, and they are all back to 100% new skin.

With these issues, I started looking at different types of substrate (and started a thread here about Coco Coir)... and since I just ran out of aspen, decided to get a block of the Eco Earth. For those that don't really know much about the Eco Earth, I'll break down how you go about using this stuff... The item I bought was the 3-brick one. It has three blocks about the size of a normal brick, and you have to allow it to soak for 30 minutes to break it up. My problem, is by following the instructions, it says to use ~1 gallon of water (3-4 quarts) per brick, and let it sit for 30 minutes. The package says that it may be "too wet" so allow it to dry in the sun for 2-3 hours will help.

After 2-3 hours of letting this stuff sit in the sun, it was clear to me that it was still WAY too wet, so I left it out overnight. I made sure to mix it up every few hours to ensure that there weren't puddles not receiving air. 24+ hours after adding the water, I figured that the substrate should be "dry enough", so I did a deep cleaning and changed tubs. I used as little substrate as possible, to keep the layer thin, but the next day all of their tubs were REALLY wet.

When I say wet, I mean "raining from the top of the tub" wet. I have a Vision 5-tub V70 rack, and two sterilite tubs. When I lift the lid on the sterilite tub, it literally rains water onto the snake..... I put an oscillating fan blowing air across the tubs (aka through the air holes), and that seems to help with the wetness along the walls of the tubs, and it doesn't "rain" when I lift the lid, but if I turn the fan off over night (I live in an condo, so there is no "snake room" and the ambient temp gets down to 69-70 in my house... tubs stay at 85-89 degrees, even at night) so I don't want to be blowing COLD air into their tubs during the night.

So here are my questions:

1. Should I be overly concerned with the amount of humidity in the tubs? I know that coconut holds a LOT more water than aspen does, which is why I got this stuff, but should I remove it from my tubs? When I pick the snakes up, they don't feel wet to the touch (with the obvious exception of where water has literally just rained down on them), so I'm not sure if this is just going to be my new normal.

2. For those that use this stuff for ball pythons, how do you "dry it out"? I really like the way the coconut looks, and I like the absorption factor, but I feel like this is too much moisture. How long do you allow this stuff to "dry off" before you put it in your tubs. I can't imagine having to pre-make my substrate a week or more before I clean tubs because I have to "let it dry". I am actually looking into getting some Herptopia bedding, but I want to see if there is anything at NARBC in Pomona before I have it shipped from the east coast (shipping is a killer).