Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Here is a new control head for the flexwat heat tape I use in my leopard gecko breeding racks. I currently have 17 individual shelves using heat at the moment. I built the system to allow for expansion down the road and it has the ability to heat 30 individual shelves or a maximum of 600 watts with the rheostat in line or 1600 watts without the rheostat. The thermostat has an independant on/off switch and is line voltage instead of the 24V ac.

Any thoughts?

Ian

looks very nice and professionally done. what is the accuracy of that line voltage stat? how much did it cost total?

vaughn

The accuracy of the thermostat is /- 2 or 3 degrees. My herp room actually will hit 90 degrees during the summer here in SoCal so I am more concerned with overheating than under.

Best guess on cost is probably 200 - 300. Most of the parts were overstock from another project at work and what I had to buy I bought at wholesale prices.

nice looking work again. just curious, you could of went with a ranco stat 50 bucks and a one deg dif. also they are rancos that have 2 relays so you could do heating and turn on a fan/ac for cooling also with one stat. around 120 bucks i think. just some food for thought.

vaughn

here's a link to the 2 stage model. this would do heating and cooling in one stat.

http://www.icca.invensys.com/uniline/d/d71.pdf#search='ranco etc 212000'

vaughn

Hi Vaughn,

In all honesty, in the twenty years or so that I have been keeping reptiles (started with my snake breeding business back in the mid '80's), I have never found it necessary to have that much accuracy. The animals are going to thermoregulate to where they are comfortable, so having an accuracy of plus or minus 2 degrees is fine.

I am in the process of remodeling my herp room right now. Unfortunately it is on the bottem of my to do list behind finishing my house remodel and building a new work shop. So I don't have fan cooling set up in my herp room. I basically have two windows and a ceiling fan in the 9 x 12 room. Where I'm at we are in the tweener stages of cold nights and warm days, once we get to more consistant temps, I'll crack a window. Ultimately I have plans to install a high end wall AC unit which has it's own thermostat. Therefore using a two stage thermostat is not necessary for me.

I can't see spending $120.00 (I can actually buy them for around $70.00 through my work account at Graingers) when I can spend $20.00 and achieve the results I want. I would rather take the extra $100.00 bucks and use it to buy more wagos and more UL approved parts to reduce the chances of an electrical fire.

Ian

that's cool, i was just throwing it out there. alot of people don't know about the 2 stage rancos and such. 70 bucks at grainger! that's a good price for a stage stat, i might need to contact you if i want one. my company has a grainger acct. but we don't buy much from them, we're in the hvac biz. you looking at a through the wall ac or a ductless system? the mitsubishi's are nice.

vaughn