Hot Summer Days: It's Okay to Turn the Heat Off

Every year the summers seem to run hotter, and longer, than the year before. We have an AC unit that keeps our snake room around 24°C, and even that struggles to keep up on the worst days when it's brutally hot outside for stretch after stretch. If you've been there too, watching your AC work overtime and wondering whether you should be doing something different with your snakes' heating, this post is for you.

This might sound obvious once it's said out loud, but it trips a lot of people up: on genuinely hot days, it's completely fine to turn off your heat source (heat mat, heat lamp, whatever you're running) and just let the enclosure sit at room temperature. We do this ourselves during heat waves, and it works exactly as you'd expect it to.

Here's a good way to check whether it's the right call: look at where your snake is choosing to be. On a hot day with the heating still running, you'll often find them parked on the cooler side of the enclosure, actively avoiding the warm end. That's your snake telling you the extra heat isn't needed right now; they're already warm enough from the ambient room temperature alone, and the heat source is just adding more than they want.

If room temperature in your snake room is sitting in a reasonable range for a hognose (and if your AC is doing its job, it generally will be), there's no need to keep artificial heat running on top of it. Turning it off isn't neglecting your snake's needs — it's actually responding to them.

We've said this in a few other posts now, and it's worth repeating here because it matters more than ever in hot weather: water is the thing to watch closely. Heat means faster evaporation, which means bowls running low or dry faster than you'd expect, even with AC running, even if the room doesn't feel that hot to you. During heat waves, check water more often than usual, not less, and don't assume yesterday's fill is still doing the job today.

• Don't panic about "too cold." Turning the heat off doesn't mean your snake is suddenly at risk of being too cold; room temperature in a home during summer is almost never low enough to be a concern for a hognose. The risk on hot days runs entirely the other direction.
• Keep an eye on where the enclosure itself sits. If it's anywhere near a window with direct sun, or on a surface that traps heat, that can push temperatures up on its own, independent of your heating equipment. Worth checking during a heat wave even if you don't normally think about it.
• Watch for signs of a snake that's too warm, not just too cold: restlessness, spending a lot of time trying to press into the coolest corner or dig down into substrate, or generally seeming unsettled rather than calm. If you see this, that's a sign to look at ambient room temperature, not just enclosure heating.
• AC struggling to keep up is a normal problem, not a crisis. If your unit can't quite hold the temperature you'd like on the worst days, don't stress too much. As long as it's keeping the room in a safe general range and the heat source is off, your snakes are still doing fine even if it's not a perfectly comfortable 24°C in there.

Hot summers aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and honestly, once you get used to reading your snake instead of just trusting a thermostat, this stuff stops feeling stressful. Turn the heat off, keep the water topped up, and trust that a snake tucked into the cool corner is exactly where it wants to be.