Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I'm building a snake rack and wanted to know people's opinions in regards to what makes the better heat source.

I have not used heat rope on a rack. I would think it's a bit safer and would offer a lot of adjustability by having more or fewer loops at a particular level.

But it probably does not have the heating potential of flexwatt and would really only work well as belly heat. Unlike flexwatt, heat rope cannot be taped to rack shelves so one would need to take the time to route a lot of channels through the shelves.

I'd love for heat rope/cable to be effective enough to use as back heat. Maybe someone will chime in and say they've had luck with this.

Either Eco Terra or ESU is coming out with a heat cable. I was on one of their websites recently and they had it listed as "coming soon". I'm sure you've already heard of Zoo Med's and Big Apple's.
-----
1.1 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Silver/Yellow)

3.4 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Green)

2.1 Gonyosoma janseni - (Black)

>>Unlike flexwatt, heat rope cannot be taped to rack shelves...

Well of course it *can* be taped to the shelves, but not in a way that will allow the rack to work as a typical lidless rack system. Due to its thickness it needs to be recessed in a groove of some sort.
-----
1.1 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Silver/Yellow)

3.4 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Green)

2.1 Gonyosoma janseni - (Black)

Heat rope is great stuff. Unfortunately, to use it as a belly heat source on rack shelves, you need to router.. alot. Still, if you have the patience, it is the best. Why? Well, with 3" Flexwatt for example, you get a 3" wide heated area under the box, then cold everywhere else. But with heat rope, you can loop it such that you have more concentrated heat towards the back and less as you go to the front.

For example, you can router three 3/16" groves along the length of the shelf towards the back with about 1" between the grooves to one another, then router 2 more grooves at 2" apart. What you now get is warmer area over the three closer runs of cable and slightly less warm over the 2 farther-apart runs. If your shelf is 18" wide, then that is 5x18 5x6" loops = 112" inches needed. No sweat, it comes in 20ft lengths or around that. But you see, alot of routering.

For baby racks you need fewer runs and so it is the best, hands down. I have it on a small baby rack, and I won't touch Flexwatt for that application again (for belly heat anyway. For back heat you might as well use Flexwatt.)
-----
Mark

Hi Mark,

You did a better idea than me of describing how I envisioned the ultimate versatility of heat cable.

But I just had an idea. Well it's an idea I already had, now I just figured a way to apply it to heat cable.

If you look at the rack below, you'll see the second shelf from the bottom is white melamine. I only point out that because it better shows how I used strips of hardboard to shim the boxes up to the appropriate height.

Well if I did that with a material slightly thicker than heat cable you would not need a router at all. You could instead have infinite variations of how many loops, what size, etc. of heat cable underneath the boxes.

Instead of routing grooves you could use foil tape inbetween these shims.

Another choice is to have the ridge around the boxes slide on tracks.

With either idea it would make having more than one size box per level difficult. That's the only downfall I can think of at the moment.
-----
1.1 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Silver/Yellow)

3.4 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Green)

2.1 Gonyosoma janseni - (Black)

pic...

-----
1.1 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Silver/Yellow)

3.4 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Green)

2.1 Gonyosoma janseni - (Black)

Beats the heck out of routering so much. Then you could lay the heat cable anyway you wish (more for tropical snakes, less for colubrids, etc).
-----
Mark

I built two racks for a friend of mine and routed a single groove in the back for the heat rope..it worked really well. I think the tubs are 4qt's which look alot smaller than the ones in the pic, but i really like the stuff it works great in cages because its very flexible and waterproof...

good luck

Jason