Humidity help?

[Coluber42]

First off - a healthy snake won't get an RI the second the humidity drops below 50%. Constantly low humidity will cause stress, contribute to mild dehydration, etc, but having the humidity drop sometimes is not an emergency.

Second, you ultimately want to get your cage set up so that the humidity can stay relatively stable without misting. Frequent misting is actually really not a great way to regulate the humidity. First of all, it's a lot of work. Second, what happens is that you make lots of little water droplets everywhere, meaning lots of surface area for water to evaporate from; but not actually very much water. So all the water that you spray evaporates all at once, and the humidity spikes, and then it escapes into the rest of the room and the humidity drops again.

You need to either reduce the ventilation so that less air (and humidity) escapes into the outside room, or you need a source for moisture to evaporate into the air from. You can reduce ventilation by covering more of the screen top (if you have one) with aluminum foil; cover all or most of it except for where the lamp or CHE is.

To add more sources of moisture, you can also use a container of damp sphagnum moss, or position a water bowl under/over a heat source. Another option is to create a humid hide in addition to the warm one and the cool one. That can be a hide with damp moss stuffed in it, or even a plastic container with an entrance cut in it and some damp moss inside. Then the snake can choose the humid environment when it wants to.

Deep substrate will also help with humidity. Coco coir or actual soil will work well, maybe with sphagnum moss mixed in or spread on top. It works because it holds moisture and releases it more slowly into the air. You can mist it or even pour a bit of water into it (if it's deep, it will absorb the water and spread it out, so your snake won't be sitting in a puddle). The one caveat is that you can't use an under tank heater with deep substrate!! The substrate will insulate it and prevent the heat from getting to the surface, and it can also contribute to the heater overheating if it isn't on a thermostat. Heat has to come from above in that case.