sign of heat pad to hot?

[Patricia]

go stick you hand directly on it, does it burn you? does it almost burn you?

Hi again, I made this same mistake when we first got our BP. Heck, it didn't even have a UTH, just an overhead lamp, so on the way home with it I stopped off at Petco and bought a UTH. Didn't know till days later that an uncontrolled UTH runs temps waaaaaaayyyy too hot.

What you need to do is instead of plugging the UTH directly into an outlet, plug it into a thermostat. An inexpensive ($20-$25) one good for one tank is the ReptiTemp 500R, which is what I use. It lets you control how cool/warm the UTH gets.

What I use to measure hot and cool temp, as well as humidity, is the AcuRite sold at WalMart for $12. It has a probe at the end of a long wire. Place that probe on the hot end. (Some people place it directly on the bottom of their tub/tank while others place it on top of the substrate where the snake actually is.) That will give you the hot reading. The AcuRite unit itself sits over at the cool end (ours is velcroed 2" above the bottom of the tank) to measure the air temp there, as well as the humidity level. Neat gadget for not much money!

At the time we got our snake, it had about 1" of ReptiBark as a substrate. It took a few days for the 500R thermostat to arrive from being ordered online, so until it did I made sure there was plenty of bark substrate above the overheated UTH to keep the snake away from that heat. (The AcuRite probe was on top of the substrate.)

After trial and error -- and overwhelming recommendation of this board -- I've discovered that the most accurate warm temp measurements came when the substrate was simply 2 sheets of newspaper, since the deeper the substrate, the more heat variance between the bottom and top of it. My setup is this: Newspaper on the bottom, AcuRite probe on newspaper, and one sheet of papertowel on top of probe and newspaper. The paper towel is to keep ink from possibly smudging onto the snake, it looks better, and is a light cover over the probe and wire.

Hope that helps! Until you get a thermostat, a plain ol' light dimmer (around $10 from stores like Lowes) will work. Here's wonderful information on how to use light dimmers.