The temperature range you are logging against
An African pygmy hedgehog is built for a warmth his winter house does not automatically provide. His comfort band sits in the low-to-mid 70s Fahrenheit — roughly 72 to 78 degrees — and below it he risks attempting hibernation, which for a pet pygmy hedgehog is dangerous rather than natural. The log exists to prove the band held: a temperature remembered in your head blurs by the end of the week, but a written record of morning and evening readings shows the cold dip on the night the heating failed, and shows whether your setup recovered. Put the probe at cage level, where the hedgehog actually lives — the air on a shelf above the cage can read several degrees kinder than the air he sleeps in.
Building a log you will actually keep
Consistency beats equipment: readings at the same two moments each day — when you first check him in the morning and at his evening feed — taken from the same probe in the same spot. A simple min-max thermometer earns its place too, since it remembers the overnight low you will never be awake to see; reset it each morning after noting the figure. Heat should come from a steady source on a thermostat — a ceramic heat emitter is the common choice, since it warms without light — and the log doubles as your check that the thermostat is doing its job: readings that swing while the setting sits still mean the setup, not the weather, needs attention.
Dry bedding through damp weeks
Winter damp creeps in through the air itself: condensation on cold walls, laundry drying indoors, a cage standing on a cold floor. Lift the cage onto a stand or board so floor chill cannot conduct up into it, and keep it in the room's warmer air, out of the direct path of any draft from doors or windows. Fleece liners are the hedgehog standard, and in damp weeks they need a daily hand-check — press your palm into his sleeping area and the corners; any liner that feels cool or clammy gets swapped for a dry one that day, not at the weekly wash. Keep a rotation of spare liners so a dry swap never waits on laundry, and let washed liners dry completely before storing them away.
Cold-night warning signs
A hedgehog who got too cold may feel cool underneath, move wobblily, refuse food, or huddle tight and unresponsive. Warm him gradually against your body or with a wrapped warm — never hot — water bottle, and do not blast him with sudden heat. Call your vet the same day even if he perks up, because a hibernation attempt stresses organs you cannot assess from outside. The log becomes genuinely useful here: being able to say the cage fell to a particular temperature for a particular stretch is precisely the history a vet wants, and it separates a one-off cold night from a pattern your setup needs fixing.
Storing the log in KinsLe's Pet Passport keeps it with the rest of his records in one portable packet — so the sitter covering a winter weekend, or the vet after a cold night, reads the same steady pattern you recorded.