Reptile & Amphibian Forums

For those of you that heat your herp room, I am curious what type of heat source you use. I was thinking it might be easier to heat an entire room herp vs. a million individual cages, and to just worry about providing additional heat for those species that require it.

Some suggest doing a combination of both. But still, what do you use to heat your entire herp room? Fan-forced, Radiant, or Oil-filled or baseboard electric or something else? Any successes, failures, trial-n-errors? All thoughts are welcome.
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I heat my herp room, using forced air. Hoever, one still needs to take into account each reptile's need to thermoregulate. It would not do to have all cages at a consistant temp. Each individual cage needs to have a high and low range, suitable for each species.

Best of luck,
GratefulFred
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GratefulFred

As you already know, I prefer oil-filled radiator heaters. They are much safer and more efficient than other types of heaters. The only downfall to these is that they do take up a bit of space since you have to leave them a certain distance away from walls, etc.

But this is not a big deal as you could install a deep counter, well above the heater for a work/storage area.

Also, I always run these off of an auxillary thermostat. I use a pretty simple one that I pick up at farm supply stores and designed to run high-wattage "milk house heaters".

I plug a multi-strip into the thermostat and then plug my heater and a box fan into the multi-strip. So when the thermostat cycles on, the fan will kick on and disperse the heat around the room.

You could run the fan all the time but I like to use it as an audible indication that my thermostat is cycling.

I use a timer with the appropriate wattage rating to turn the whole unit off to achieve night time temperature drops. Since herp rooms tend to have a lot of thermal mass I'll often have the heat turn off hours before the lights turn off so the temp drops gradually before "nightfall". Similarly, I have the heater turn on a few hours before the lights so it warms up gradually. You'll have to experiment on your own to see what works best.

Lastly, play around with the built in thermostat built into your oil-based heater. I like to get it so that it runs just a bit hotter than I need and then hook it into the auxillary thermostat. That way if I have a thermostat failure and the heater continues to run (many thermostats won't allow this, however), I know the room will not overheat.

Great advice on the use of baseboard heaters. Using a second thermostst is the answer. I was just pondering this as I saw yours and Carl3s post on this. Off to Tractor Supply first thing Sunday morning. Randy

I use both a electric baseboard heater along with my homes regular heating system. As you already know, I keep Candoia and to keep them at roughly 78 to 82 degrees I set the furnace at 68 degrees and let the baseboard heater do the rest.Find one with a thermostat built in. They are more expensive but you wont have to adjust the heater all the time like I do. Thats hindsight to me now because I was being cheap when I went Menards
Randy