I have a little aquarium with a leopard gecko in it on top of a chest in my bedroom. It tends to get kind of cold in there at night in the winter so to supplement the heat from his lamp I put a heating pad underneath the tank. One day I came home from work and the upstairs of my house smelled like something was burning. It took me a little while to figure out what it was but once I did I was most unhappy. What happened was the heating pad had gone berserk and melted itself, burned the top of the chest, and melted the plastic on the bottom of the tank.

Moral of the story: Don’t leave your heating pad on all the time no matter how cold your lizard is.

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