Hi folks,

New to the forum, here. New to being a reptile owner. Always dreamed of owning one, my parents never let me have pets. Finally got a degree and a job as a Software Engineer, my own place, and I bought a ball python a month and a half ago. Named him Sparky. All was well. For the first couple weeks, I didn't use a heat lamp and the humidity would be around 40% on a good day. Then I started using the lamp. That lamp causes the humidity to drop to around 20% for most of the day, and it's not even that strong a lamp. If I'm home, I'm constantly misting with a squirt bottle thing and that helps for all of 20 minutes (up to maybe 65% humidity) before it's bone dry again. I work full time so I can't always be there with a squirt bottle. I tried soaking a towel in water and covering the majority of the top of the terrarium with it, and this helped the humidity stay up for a little longer, but mostly minimal effect. Plus I had to keep soaking the towel a couple times a day. So I went to PetSmart (where I bought him) and bought an automatic mister. The machine was a loud intermittent squirt gun. No matter how much I adjusted the nozzles provided, all they did was shoot a stream of water in a general direction. This was causing a line of soaked substrate to appear on the terrarium floor, but did nothing for the humidity.

I just don't see how I can keep the humidity up in this terrarium. I want Sparky to be happy and have happy sheds. I mean water vapor floats upward right? So it just goes right up out the top of the terrarium as soon as it's humid. My room is pretty dry, too (but I don't want to have a humidifier in there, I sweat too much at night lol). What should I do?