Posted by:
SoLA
at Mon May 9 22:29:46 2011 [ Report Abuse ] [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by SoLA ]
I just want to post an great review of the new Herpstat 4. I can't list all incredibly cool things they programmed into this device, so I decided I would share how I used it to set up one of my Pseustes poecilonotus cages (photo included below).
The upper right part of the cage has a heat panel with probe by the rock on top of the hide basket. It is set to begin warming up at 5 am for 8 hours peaking at 97.9F by 1 pm where it stays for 3 hours and begins to cool down from 4pm to midnight getting down to 77.7F. Meanwhile there is a probe in the lower left part of the cage set to 70.7F from 9am to 9pm and 66.6F 9 pm to 9 am. To attempt to get close to these temps I have a fan pulling warm air out of a warm side vent and a fan blowing cool air into a cool end vent. Obviously right now it will not hit as low as I targeted, but once I get my basement finished, it should get a little closer. The point is to maximize thermogradient, and I certainly can't think of a better way.
Every 5 hours a reading is taken for my humidity targeted between 75% and 85%. If during any check it is below this, my misting system (see two nozzles in center) will go off for 90 seconds. In addition, at 11:30 am and 7 pm, the system will mist for 90 seconds regardless of the humidity at the time.
I had my lighting set to have the LED lights on at 1% at night to mimic moderate moonlight and at 5:30 am to 8:45 am, the light will gradually brighten to 100% where they stay until 6:00 pm where they fade back down to the 1% moonlight by 9:15 pm. Unfortunately my LED lights run on a 120v to 12v transformer and it can't handle the dimming so I need to use straight 120v lights or find a transformer that is "dimable."
Everything I mentioned can be done on the Herpstat 4 and you still have and outlet to spare to do whatever else you want to do on. And I came nowhere close to using up the watt limit pet output, so if I had more cages this size, I could have them all running the same way.
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