So when I drink water I always like cold water even if I’m in a cold environment. But that makes sense because I’m a warm blooded creature.

On the other hand snakes are cold blooded and they require external warmth so I could see them prefering warm drinking water. At the same time though, in a natural environment any water they drank would be cooler than the air so maybe cooler water would feel more normal. Also in a properly setup terarium a snake has ample access to warmth from other sources so they don’t really need the additional heat from warm drinking water so maybe having cool water would be a nice change and allow better temp regulation. But warm water also has the side benefit of helping boost humidity.

Anyways, this is just what I decided to overthink today. I’m also not talking actually hot or cold, just lukewarm or cool. What do you all think? Would my pet snake prefer to have their water dish topped up with cool or warm water?

  • Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    Oh yeah, basically the easiest way to do it would to pump water out of each basin, through a heat exchanger, and then back into the basin. That way you could have your whole temp control aparatus located outside of the terrarium. Plus that would also easily enable automatic water level management to keep the water levels identical. For your heat exchanger you could just use a CPU water block and a peltier device. You regulate the power going to the peltier device by monitoring a temp sensor in your water return pipe and just pulsing the peltier device on and off at different rates to control the heating or cooling rate. Plus with the peltier device you can just reverse the polarity to switch from heating to cooling to enable the shuffling of the basins. All of this would be controlled and charted in a csv file by a raspberry pi. Additionally you could connect a simple motion sensor so the pi could flag the times the snake was using one of the basins to make it easier to read the data.

    Rather than monitoring ambient temp or humidity you would probably be better off just keeping them tightly controlled and constant via other systems. That would further reduce variables for the initial test.