How to Choose a Heat Source for a Snake Cage

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Johan Svahnstrom on behalf of Expert Village. The next thing to think about is to keep your snakes warm. Now, I live in south Florida so I don't have that big of a problem with that. Especially when I keep my snakes outside. However, if you live in the northern United States or something like that you need to be sure that your snakes keep warm. There's a few different things that you need to do. One of the best things to do is to keep a belly heat underneath your snake. Now if you keep your snake on a metal stand like I have this one it is difficult but if you keep your snakes inside on a flat surface, you can use one of these regular heat pads that are used for humans. You can buy them at any department store across the United States. Just keep that underneath the cage for about a quarter of the cage so that the snake can choose to be on the heat pad if it wants to and if it doesn't want to be on the heat pad it can go off. Do not keep it underneath the water because then it gets too humid in the cage. How about sunlight? If you keep your snake inside it's a good idea to keep some time of a UVB light on top of your cage for at least a portion of the day. You can buy these at pet stores all over the place. I use these cheap reflectors like this you can pick up. You can keep that on one side of the tank or in the middle or whatever. Just make sure the snake gets some kind of a natural sunlight. There's different varieties of light bulbs that you can buy. You can also buy a console that will go over the entire cage. At certain places you get the long tubes instead of the bulbs. I also keep a hot spot on my snakes to make sure that it gets real hot in one spot so they can actually bask underneath this light. You can use another one, you can go to the pet store and get a spot light. You can easily read on all the different light bulbs what they are for. You need to read about your snake and see what the snake likes. Some of the snakes that you can keep don't really require any lights. They do fine without any. A hog-nosed snake, even corn snakes I've kept and bred successfully without any type of lighting at all. However, to keep a light on the cage looks kinda nice as well. You can see the snake a little bit better. Especially the light where you have your natural sunlight - it brings out the color in the snake and it makes it look beautiful. Especially pythons, which have this iridescent skin that shows up beautifully in a UVB light bulb."