These temperature recommendations are specific to carpet pythons tho you can adapt them to any number of species!
This is prolly the most common way of keeping a moderate amount of snakes, basically this where you’ve upgraded and now have a room dedicated to your animals!! Your still using heated enclosures but you have a bit more control over the ambient this way! This is where I was at for a number of yrs! With this method you can lower the hot spot a bit as your ambient, even without supplemental heating, will be slightly higher then keeping them in a corner of the dining room.
So the idea with this method is to keep them in a slightly more controlled environment, and at this point you prolly have a good number of reptiles if your dedicating a room to them. So the heat from the cages and racks should raise the ambient to where your hotspot can come down to 85-86, in most situations that sweet spot is 75-78. If you want to add a room heater, you can set the room at 78-80 and your hot spot can be 84-85. This method is much safer then a hot spot in the mid 90s. Again if you have 1-6 animals I understand not wanting to/being unable to dedicate a room to the animals. If you don’t want to run room heat, the heat from the cages should be enough to make the room ambient go up to where you want it. Now with this method, as with all things animal related, I recommend setting them up and watching the animals to see how they react to it. Ideal behavior for these guys is for them to bask for a little bit, go off do snakey things, come back get warm again, go off again. If they are spending all day basking, with out a recent meal, you need to raise the hotspot, if they are never on the hot side, you need to lower the hot spot.
Now for setting up the heat, the 2 most important things, 1) snake cannot come in direct contact with heating element, what ever that is! With exception of heat panels, those seem pretty safe, but I don’t use them So I can’t tell you for sure. 2) thermostat! There are lots of places to cut corners in this hobby, but thermostats are not one of them! Do go cheap for the controller of a source of fire!! Rancos are about as cheap as I’d say you can get away with! There are plenty of good thermostats for reptiles just search and pick one! I’ll touch on controlling room temps in a future post! If you use light bulbs, make sure there’s a wire cage of some kind to prevent the snake being able to come in direct contact with the bulb. Heat tape should be used outside the enclosure only, so if your using melamine then either light bulbs or heat panels. Which ever you use make sure there’s a good thermostat attached to it to make sure it doesn’t get to hot. With bulbs on/off stats work better then proportional, and the opposite is true for heat panels. With this method I haven’t noticed a big difference in over head vs under tank heating, with the colder ambients of the previous article over head is preferred as it seems they heat differently from the top vs the bottom. Now that the ambient is more controlled you can get away with different sources of heat, experiment and see what happens!
Now with this method I’m still going to still recommend either Pvc or wood caging as you still want the heat retention of the caging to work with you, as you aren’t quite heating the room yet so at night and some winter days you’ll still have issues getting up to temperature. Also still use closed in racks as you’ll want the heat retention as well.
