Quote Originally Posted by blackcrystal22 View Post
First of all, I don't know anything about Bed-A-Beast but I'm going to guess it's like ground cypress, which should be fine.

Get rid of that log hide. Those are extremely useless to ball pythons. Balls also don't need large water bowls because they don't need to soak, anything the size of a deli cup (2 in wide) is fine. They just need it to drink.

Ball pythons do not bask, they hide constantly. They need there proper temperatures where they hide. Get two identical one opening hides (make sure they are snug, you want all sides of the hide to touch him at all times!) and put one on the warm side and one on the cool side.
100F is burning temperature!! You never want any area to exceed 95F under the substrate. Remove any basking light you have immediately, because it sucks humidity and they would not use it anyway. You have a UTH? What are you using to control it? If nothing, get a dimmer temporarily from a hardware store (they go for 50c or so a piece) and look into investing for a nice thermostat to control your UTH.
Do you have digital thermometers with probes? Digital hygrometer for humidity? You can get the probe thermometers at a petstore or online (you should have two, one for warm one for cool, and the probes should be put under the substrate above the UTH) and a digital hygrometer/thermometer set at Walmart or Home Depot in the gardening section, this will tell you your ambient temp which should stay at about 80-85F.
If you have any dial (non-digital) thermometers or hygrometers, trash them. They are extremely inaccurate and useless.

Feed him in his enclosure, taking him out of the cage will only stress him out more.
Bed-a-beast is ground coconut husk. My local herp shop uses only this for their snakes because you can keep one side dry and one side moist for humidity variability.

Actually, my ball tends to climb up on top of his log hide (which is what I intended it for) and bask in the leaves under his heat lamp. He also spends a fair amount of time climbing up in the leaves and vines wrapped around his driftwood logs. My herp shop recommended a basking point between 95 and 105 degrees that he can climb up to if he so desires. This is the ambient temp in that area, not a surface temp.

I do not use the UTH that I have because my herp specialists told me not to. All of my temps are achieved via overhead heat lamps. These do not dry out my tank too much because I'm using bed-a-beast and have a large water bowl to help maintain humidity.

My ambient temp on the floor of the enclosure is 85-95 on the warm side and 70-80 on the cool side. I do not use probes for under substrate temps because I do not use under tank heaters.

I have thermometers and hygrometers on both ends of the tank laying right on the surface of the substrate. They are not digital. At some point I will upgrade to digital, but like I said, I already spent $150 getting his enclosure to this point and can't afford anything else for a while as I'm about to enter an internship that costs $10,000. Besides, the dial therm/hygrometers that I currently have are reading at least somewhat accurately currently because if I swap them out, they quickly adjust to the new area and read what the previous gauge read in that spot.

Also, my herp shop specialists recommended the feeding bin to actually minimize stress because he will be in complete darkness and will have more privacy in an opaque bin than in his enclosure. Besides, I don't want him swallowing substrate accidentally.