New to ball phytons, help!

[starmom]

Well, a couple of suggestions:
- To help bump up the heat, you can get some rigid insulation, or foam boad, or cork board to wrap around the sides and back of the tank. Glass tanks lose a lot of heat!
- The stick on temp gauges are notoriously inaccurate! Lots of people use Acu-Rite digital thermometer/hygrometer. Lowes and Wal-Mart carry this brand. I'm sure that if you do a google search, you'll find lots more places.
- You will more than likely need more heat and that would mean purchasing an under tank heater (UTH). The UTH will need to be controlled by a thermostat (Ranco, Johnson, Helix, Herpstat).
- I suspect that humidity might be low given how you are heating and that it is a glass tank. Sphagnum moss is good for bumping humidity!! Another way to help hold in the humidity is to use foil or plexiglass on the top of your tank.
- Ball pythons don't need UV lighting. Regular day time light is all they need and they typically do very well with just the normal light that is available from the windows within the room where the tank is.

Lastly, lots of people keep snakes in tanks and do so successfully, albeit with a lot of initial tweaking. If you are committed to making this work, you will succeed!!! If this all sounds like a lot, many people use tubs or a reptile cage.

Very lastly, I think a 55g is really big for a ball python and will make it really hard to get temps and humidity dialed in...