How are my temps

[Larkspeed]

THis is my first corn snake ir snake of any kind for that matter so I would like to make sure i do this right.

I have a 1 meter male corn snake.

He is living in an all glass terrarium that is 40cm deep, 50 cm tall and 80 cm wide.

I have a 7 watt economy light in the middle to provide "daylight"

I have a 50 watt halogen basking spot at one end to provide "sun light"

Both of these lights are on a timer so that they come on at 7am and go off at 11pm to give him a regular day/night cycle.

I also have an 8 watt heat mat under the "sun" side to privide a warm floor.

There is also all the usual stuff like an insert in the back to provide "rock" shelves and some branches for climbing and such.

Substrate is a mulch that the pet store recommended for snakes.

He can also hide at both the cold and warm ends.

According to a cheap digital thermometer I bought the warm end is 34 degrees C and the cold end is 26 degrees C.

This is messured with the sensor sitting directly on top of the substrate and not in the shade.

Are these temps good and should I change anything in his setup to make him happier or more comfortable?

 

[Nanci]

Where to start? 34C is way too hot. WAY too hot. You want the temp, on the UTH, under the substrate, to be 30C. I don't know if your surface temp is so high because the UTH is unregulated or because the halogen light is so hot it is baking everything, or both.

Cornsnakes are nocturnal. They do not need or want UV light.

Your cool side can range from 18-24C, preferable near the warmer end of that.

A probed digital thermometer is the easiest way to get an accurate temp reading.

 

[Larkspeed]

this is all very confusing. i keep reading and getting senor on top of substrate, sensor under.

a whole slew of different temp ranges and so on.

I just don't know which direction to go in any more

 

[Nanci]

If you are providing heat by the preferred method, UTH, then the controlling factor is you do not want the snake to contact temps hot enough to burn or harm him. So you need to know what the hottest temp he can get to is, which is the UTH _under_ the substrate, because he's going to burrow down to it, not lay on top of the substrate.

 

[Larkspeed]

ok so the heat mat I have now is an 8watt conductive pad. so the pad itself gets warm and conducts that heat through to the glass.

I'm assuming that this style of heat mat cannot be used on a thermostat?

Will I need to change it to an infra-red heat mat to use the matstat?

and in the mean time can I put this style of mat on a dimmer switch to reduce the heat it produces manualy?

 

[Nanci]

The heat mats we use in the US are wires encased in plastic. The pad is plugged in and the wires heat the plastic. It may or may not be glued to the glass- usually we do that. They work very well with a thermostat, and they work okay with a rheostat or lamp dimmer.

I don't think I've ever seen an IR heat mat.

 

[Larkspeed]

Most of the ones I see listed on ebay say they are infra-red mats.

But that being said we had a dimmer unit that we bought ages ago and has just been sitting in the cupboard.

I now have that on the heat mat and I have turned off the "sun" spot since it's a bit redundant.

With a bit of playing I now have the glass directly above the heat mat reading between 29.1 and 29.9C I put the fluctuation down to the thermomer more than the actualy temp but I would average it to 29.5C directly on the glass above the mat and under the substrate.

Is that better?

 

[Asbit]

Much better temp.