Bulb question

[Coluber42]

Let me get this straight, you move around a hot bulb and you wonder why a snake that sees heat noticed? And yes you can use a Che on a thermostat, but they burn three times hotter at the base then a comparable bulb. Right over your tank, zapping humidity. I’ve been using infrared bulbs for years, so have many others. They work just fine.

I know you can use a CHE with a thermostat, that’s what I said. I also did not say that you can’t use “infrared” bulbs, just that if it makes red light that you can see, the snake can see it too and therefore it isn’t all the way dark. They can certainly do just fine with it, I don’t think that in itself is really a big deal. Just something to be aware of.
All of these things produce actual infrared radiation whether or not they produce visible light, but the component of the red light that you can see is in the visible spectrum.

In any case, I personally think a CHE is a better heat source than an incandescent bulb because you can use it with a thermostat to fine-tune the temperature. With an incandescent bulb it’s either on or off, and you get what you get; the only adjustment you can make is to raise it higher above the lid. So if the temperature in your house fluctuates over the course of the day when you’re not at home or at night when you’re asleep, an incandescent heat lamp won’t adjust to compensate.

For the record - to test how my snake would react to red light, I used a red LED bike light. So not much heat there (although they can detect minutely small temperature differences). And I made a point of holding my hand still while turning it on and off, and rotating it in order to point the light different directions. I also tried blocking and un-blocking it with a piece of cardboard. I did this in a totally dark room with nothing but a very dim light inside the cage - just enough that I could see if the snake moved. In other words, I did everything I could think of to make sure that if he reacted, the reaction was to the light itself and not to something else. My conclusion was that yes, he can see it - at least, he can see the wavelengths that that particular LED emits. I did not repeat the test with a wide variety of LED’s in various shades of red.