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Heating a shoebox sized sterilite box?

Tyger9791

Tyger9791

Animal Care Specialist
I got a really small anery hatchling last Wednesday. he's only about 12" in length. I was keeping him in a 10 gal, but he's almost successfully escaped the tank twice...he's just skinny enough to squeeze through the gaps between the hinges on my screen top. the screen top i have is two pieces hinged in the middle so you can open one half of it at a time. my other snakes havent had any issues with this sort of top. their bodies/heads are too big to fit through the gaps.
so to prevent any more escape attempts, i've moved the hatchling into a sterilite box that is about the size of a shoebox and has a lid that snaps on.
in the box, i've put papertowels on the bottom, two tiny terra cotta pots for hides, and a small waterbowl. now the heating issue...can I use the UTH from my 10 gal to heat the box? the UTH is hooked up to a rheostat, but will it damage the box at all or hurt the snake? and the UTH is stuck to a ceramic tile so i wont have to worry about having to unpeel it from the tank. :)
it's really only temp housing for my anery corn until he gets just a bit bigger. then he'll go back into the 10 gal.
 
That depends on the UTH. The Zoomed's mini size (also their crab heaters, which are both 4 watt I think), are the only ones recomended by that manufacturer for plastic. Anything else is just too hot.
 
cool. thats the one i think i have for my 10 gal. i'll have to check. it is a zoo med and it's really small.
 
I have used the smallest Exo-Terra heat mat sucessfully on plastic sterlite containers. It didnt melt the plastic at all.
 
Whatever you do make sure you have a probe for temps in the substrate at a point near the center of the UTH.

I know I was surprised what a 4-watt element can do to a thicker piece of glass, particularly when the ambient temperature soared unexpectedly. If I didn't have a probe in one of my 10 gallons I was using for a yearling the temps might well have gotten over 95 degrees inside of a half hour.

While not necessarily fatal per se it still can be life-shortening stress on your snake.

Just take a little precaution to avoid an accident.
 
Thanks. i put a temp probe in there and the temps are good. thats my other worry, that it will get hot in there real quick in such a small space. i dont want to cook the little guy.
i hooked up the UTH to the rheostat and set it on low. so far so good. my gf likes to keep the temp of the house freezing, so usually i worry that it's not warm enough for the reptiles.
right now he's got a full belly. he ate a pinky last night and he's curled up inside of his pot.
 
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