Make sure you have a thermostat (or at least a lamp dimmer) for your UTH! An unregulated heat source can burn your snake very, very quickly! A dimmer's only ~$12-15 dollars at a home improvement store and are great if you can't afford a $100+ thermostat right away or yours is broken. They have to be watched much more closely than a thermostat because they can't compensate for fluctuations in the ambient air temp but once they're dialed in they stay pretty steady so long as the room temp doesn't go up and down and up and down. I got the temp to settle pretty easily with it in the space of an hour or two and only had to fuss with it when I bumped the room temp up a little more.