Heat panel placement.

[jjhill001]

The only gradient my snakes get is based on where the heating element is placed. Because my natural terrarium's setup is more or less vertically oriented because of my custom background. The top part of the terrarium tends to be a few degrees warmer than the bottom.

There is no rule that says a tank's gradient has to be left to right, right to left, back to front etc.

For me my gradient goes from top/back and sort of to the right (warm) to bottom and sort of left/front (coolish). If your tank is set up with lots of climbing spaces and such then I think it wouldn't be ridiculous to go for top/back to bottom front for a gradient.

When I make my move to a heat panel here in the near future I will be remaining in this top hot/down cool gradient approach. It's not only easier to accomplish than left right, especially with heat from the top, but it is technically more natural. I imagine that due to the more gentle nature of a heat panel that it will actually make it even easier to accomplish than what I've been doing with my snake with this ceramic heat emitter setup I have going.

I will qualify my technique by mentioning that my snake has 4-6 inches of substrate to dig into if they want to be cooler and they often utilize this despite the max temp in the terrarium being 83F (much cooler than the recommended hot spot) directly below the CHE, in theory when the CHE is running the snake could stretch up to be right next to it but I've never seen this occur.

I do agree that, at least from my research on RHP that two of them is gonna be major overkill unless your home is REALLY cold.