Help needed with beginner setup
Hey you all,
hope this is the right flair since its my first post here.
Five days ago i took on a cornsnake as my first pet animal ever. It was not plannend nor do i have any experience but after hearing that a friend couldnt keep him anymore, i dove in and said "Better than to let him go to the rescue".
What i thought i would get was a carefree Everything-you-need-package free of charge. What i got was a to small enclosure, completly unprotected bulb, wrong and dry af substrate and a underfed, possibly underdeveloped animal. Would have been smarter to back out at this point but I couldnt bring myself to leave him there.
With the help of another friend and the owner of the mother to my snake we went shopping and have, after some emergency repairs to the second bigger tank we also got from the previous owner, managed to build the setup you can see in the pics.
100x40x40 cm tank, drainage layer out of clay pellets, substrate mix out off coco fiber, moss and what was sold as terrarium soil. Some artificial farn for the beginning, branches, cork bark hideouts and tubes and a stoneplate and artificial cave on the warm side.
Now to the problems.
For the love of god i cant get the tank warm enough for what im reading is recomended. On the warmer side its about 22° C airtemp and 25° C groundtemp, on the colder side about 19° C groundtemp. Underneath the tank i have two 7 watt heating mats with kork insulatiom below and 4 cm of air to the tank floor (wich is plexi unfortunately). Above i have a LED bar just for lighting on the cold side and a 40 watt heat lamp about 20 cm above the tanktop (wich is 3/4 glas unfortunately).
What would be your best way to reach over all better temps in that setup of a tank?
Sorry for the long post and thanks for making it to here.
Any advice is highly aprecciated, just trying my best to give him the best possible life within a budget i thought would be just running costs.