RHP's and radiation

[Coluber42]

The stuff about black body radiation is fairly basic physics; you can easily find more on YouTube or Wikipedia or a high school physics textbook. It's worth having some basic knowledge of how heat works in general, because it can save you a whole lot of $$ in heating and cooling your own house more efficiently, let alone your snake.

I have two 18" T8 fixtures in my ball python's enclosure with Reptisun 5.0 bulbs. Most of the cage is too far from the bulbs for the UV to penetrate, but there are a couple of higher platforms that are closer. My snake does bask openly from time to time, but more often he will mostly curl up in a hide on the upper platform with just a loop of his body sticking out in the UV. He can easily fit completely inside the hide, and when that bulb was burned out that's what he did. But once I got a new bulb, he was back to always having part of his body sticking out. That's called "cryptic basking"; lots of animals do that as a way to catch some rays while staying more hidden from predators.
Snakes don't need UV the way many lizards do (who will get sick if they don't have it) but it still has some benefits. They do need to have a circadian rhythm, and they're from an equatorial region so keeping lights on a 12-hour timer takes care of that.

It goes without saying that the whole thing is that the snake should be able to choose when and whether to hang out under the lights. In other words, there should also be plenty of areas of the cage that are in the shade and hides that are dark inside.

If nothing else, the lights look nice and are good for the plants. It's not the UV that the plants like, it's just the white light in general. The output of these bulbs is a pretty low percentage UV, it's mostly visible light. And the UV they do put out does not make it very far, which is why you also need to have a basking area sufficiently close (but not too close). If the light shines through a plastic cover or a mesh screen, that will stop some of the UV from penetrating too.
So worst case scenario is that the snake doesn't care, and you have some nice looking lights in the cage.