cant maintain a high temperature in glass cage

[mattchibi]

Correct me if Im wrong, but it sounds like your room temperature is around 70-75. This means that with a cool ambient room temperature like that, its quite frankly impossible to heat up an entire glass enclosure with just a UTH. "The reptile store guy" frequently gets a lot of things wrong in my experience, I would listen to any of the experienced members on here before I check anywhere else for information.

So in your case, since you are using a glass tank, here are my suggestions:

1) Like del said, get some kind of insulation (corrugated cardboard is a great temporary insulator) and tape it to 3 sides of your glass tank, every side but the front.

2) Put 2-3 layers of tin foil and tape it to the top of the enclosure, leaving either 1/3-1/4 of the top open, or leaving a 1" strip at the back of the lid with no foil. Keep in mind you need fresh air getting into the tub, because chances are you are going to be misting like crazy to keep the humidity up. If you are misting regularly, you need to ensure there is enough fresh air flow, otherwise the air starts to get stagnant, with "dead spots" in the cage, and it makes it much easier for bacteria to build up.

3) Change your black light bulb out. You want either a CHE (Ceramic heat emitter) or an Infrared heat lamp, with a dimmer. You must get a dimmer for your heat lamp so you can manually control the ambient temps. The way I have my glass tank setup is: I have an infrared light smack dab in the center of the lid. My UTH is on the warm side under the warm hide. I use a 60 Watt bulb and have no problem reaching 77-78 on the cool side, even at night. Anything over 75 is okay.

4) Your thermostat and thermometer probe placements are wrong. Keep only a 1/2" of substrate over your UTH. Here's how your probes should be set up:

Accurite: Put the actual accurite on the cool side, and string the probe UNDER the substrate onto the warm side. Use a bit of hot glue to secure the probe, directly in the center above the UTH, above the glass. Now you have a way to measure the HOTTEST temperature your snake can reach. Keep in mind ball pythons are burrowing creatures. I frequently find my snake burrowed under the substrate and touching the glass, but I know its completely safe because my thermostat doesnt let the UTH go above 92.

Thermostat: Put the thermoSTAT probe between your UTH and the bottom of the glass. The thermostat probe will measure the temperature of your UTH, and quite frequently, the temperature that you set on your thermostat will be higher than the temperature you want. But that is completely normal. For example, in order to hit 92 on my hot spot, I set my herpstat thermostat to 94. When my tank was in a colder room, I had to set it to 97 to reach 92. So you want it to be (from top to bottom): Substrate - Accurite thermometer probe - glass - thermostat probe - UTH

Good luck! You also may want to provide a bit more ground cover. By the looks of those hides, your snake is a bit small for that cage. you could really make it feel more secure by "blacking out" three sides (this can be done if you insulate with corrugated cardboard too), as well as providing more ground cover (such as fake plants or crumpled newspaper)