Is my Syrian too cold?

[Letty]

Hi guys, so I have yet another question to add to my endless list lol
So today it got suddenly pretty cold where I live. Not freezing temps but not far off. I noticed my Syrian hamster wasn’t coming out of her bed as normal, so I went to check on her. Normally she wakes up immediately when I open her cage, but when I did there was no reaction. So being super worried about her I tapped on her shelf (she’s made her bed underneath it), still no reaction so I went to remove the shelf to check on her closer. She woke up pretty suddenly, so I left it. She immediately left her bed to check out what was going on and has been normal - active and alert - since. This was about 4 hours ago. I’ve propped her cage up and put a hot water bottle underneath and given her a ton of substrate and bedding, best I can do at short notice unfortunately, and she seems fine now. I’m going to buy some reptile heating mats after work tomorrow. Could she have been too cold? The room she is in was a teeny bit chilly but I’ve no idea of the actual temperature. Also is it likely to be safe to fix the heating mats to the underside of the cage or will they damage the plastic?

[cypher]

You do need to know the temperature in the room rather than just guessing so I would get a thermometer & check to see.
It's important to keep the room temperature high enough rather than trying to heat the cage so either turn the heating up or use something like an oil filled radiator which is cheap to run to keep the room warm. Ideally around 18-20C day & night.
Don't put any source of heat touching the cage, you could overheat your ham or just make things uncomfortable for her, if it gets extremely cold I do use snugglesafe heat pads but never touching the cage, I put mine on a shelf at least a few inches under the cage & never directly under the nest area, if your cage isn''t on a shelf you may be able to prop it up on something but make sure it's stable.
You can also help by providing a big pile of shredded white toilet tissue so your ham can make a bigger warmer nest if she wants to.

[Letty]

We have an oil radiator so I will set it up. I’ve bought a room thermometer and it’s ok in there during the day it just gets cold at night. I’ll still keep a heat pad under the cage just in case, it’s securely elevated so there’s like a 2 inch gap underneath. Might not do a whole lot but I figure it’s better than nothing. Thanks very much for the advice

[Pebbles82]

I set my oil filled radiator on a plug in timer so it comes on in the middle of the night for a couple of hours - so it doesn’t get too cold after the heating goes off