Need help with enclosure setup

I recently bought a wooden enclosure. I have friends that have them with there snakes also and they worked fine. For some reason Ike wants to sleep in between the heat lamps. Due to that I had to unplug them to ensure they dont come on while he is on there. The temps in his cage is 80 degress and humidity is 53%. Are there any suggestions on alternate means of heating the cage? I only had a heatpad for it now. Its keeping it at 80 but he wont go in his hide. I really want to build some type of guard that will go around the light and prevent him from coiling between them. Any suggestions will be helpful thanx.

make a screen box and put it around the lights but make a door on the botton so you can change the light when needed

Thanx for the suggestion, I decided to take the wooden cage back and go with a glass one. I fixed the heat/ humidity problem by getting a 50 watt bulb abd placing a wet towel over the other half of the cage. It seems to keep the heat at 85ish and the humidity at 65-70

I used to have a glass tank, and here's what I did --

I used a heat lamp and a heat pad on one side, both controlled by a thermostat. The heatlamp had a 75w red bulb in it. I used shredded coconut bark substrate (the kind that comes in a compressed brick) since it holds humidity well. Then I covered 2/3 of the screen top with 3 layers of tinfoil and 2 layers of black duct tape. I left an 8-inch square on the warm side for the heat lamp. With all of that, I had everything set perfectly. Heat was 90 degrees on the warm side, 80 on the cool side. Humidity stayed at a constant 65-70% and I only had to mist the substrate every 3-4 days as it dried out. To monitor the warm side, I used an ESU digital thermometer with probe. To monitor the ambient/cool side and the humidity, I used a Fluker's digital thermometer/hygrometer combo in the middle.

Good luck!

Thanx for the info...Ill try to use that technique since it involves alot of low cost common items. I read one of your husbandry posts on the snakekeeper forum and it helped out alot also... Thanx again...

Was it the one that describes all of that stuff with pics? I can't seem to find that one anywhere on there, not sure where it went. I also have it posted here if you need it:

Glass tank setup...

Thanx alot armygirl. I actually lucked up and bought the last bag of coconut bark from my local petstore and its working out as u advertised. As for the post... It was a while ago... I tried to join that forum but the moderator wont accept my membership request. But I have been going to that site before I bought my pastel doing research and gathering info. I just hadnt been able to join.

I am the moderator on the SK forums...but membership requires admin validation. Dan told me there's a glitch in the software and he's not getting notification of new members, so no one has been validated in the last month or two. He'll get to it when things get fixed, be patient.