Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Out of curiosity has anyone ever wired a digital thermostat for a house for use with a cage or rack

if not, can't be done. simply put.

Thermostats for the house are designed to run at an extremly low voltage, connecting to another part which is inside your HVAC unit that actually turns the HVAC on and off. If you were actually able to wire a thermostat for a house, you would have to also obtain this control module out of some HVAC unit (probably more than its worth), then be able to somehow wire it together. You would also have to put this thermostat in the cage - there could be no probe.

However, one day i'll invent a thermostat that measures the temperatures in multiple different rooms of the house, along with humidity, averaging it all together - then i'll make a million dollars
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-Chris

The reason mainstream thought is thought of as a stream is because it's so shallow. -George Carlin

A fool doesn't learn. A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. Which one are you?

My Website
N. American Rat/Corn snake care sheet I wrote
Information on substrates

Current snakes:
0.1 Licorice Stick Black Rat (Lola)
1.0 Black Rat (Frankie)
0.1 Texas Bairdi (Rosa)
0.1 Blue Beauty (Brunhilde)
1.0 Green Tree Python (Monty)

I knew it was gonna be more ttrouble than it's worth. Or everyone would be doing it. The household units are very cheap and the digital units come with a couple cool programmable features.
Thanks for the feedback

Chris,
There is computer software out there designed to control features through out ones house to include HVAC. Bill Gates has one such system more elaborate but fitting.

One could take an "electrical switch", (one circuit when closed closes another). And design a cheap model where your common low wattage house hold thermostat would close a higher wattage 110V branch line the resources are out there but one would need an electrical background like you said before.

Have a personal intrest in this because I have been trying to create a program to control all my cages with a devoted PC. Beleive me if it was easy it would be done!
My 2 Cents

yeah... i was going into electrical engineering then computer science for a while so i've played around with that sort of stuff before. so yeah it could be done, but as i said you'd have to know a heck of a lot about that stuff - as you seem to. I'm happy with my $20 A life thermostat from LLL, and my snakes arent complaning
-----
-Chris

The reason mainstream thought is thought of as a stream is because it's so shallow. -George Carlin

A fool doesn't learn. A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. Which one are you?

My Website
N. American Rat/Corn snake care sheet I wrote
Information on substrates

Current snakes:
0.1 Licorice Stick Black Rat (Lola)
1.0 Black Rat (Frankie)
0.1 Texas Bairdi (Rosa)
0.1 Blue Beauty (Brunhilde)
1.0 Green Tree Python (Monty)

I work in the HVAC field doing controls. There are several companies that do computer controlled A/C systems for building and for homes. Its really simple stuff but very expensive to buy. Even if you had a very large breeding business the cost is too great to get to return on the investment. I got a $60.00 line voltage t-stat on my racks because of the cost. This is my 2 cents on this issue. If you come up with a cheap system let me know please.

>>One could take an "electrical switch", (one circuit when closed closes another). And design a cheap model where your common low wattage house hold thermostat would close a higher wattage 110V branch line the resources are out there but one would need an electrical background like you said before.
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>>Have a personal intrest in this because I have been trying to create a program to control all my cages with a devoted PC. Beleive me if it was easy it would be done!

Well, if anyone out there has an electrical engineering background, I know exactly which ICs to use to build this project! The cost of the ICs for the temp monitoring and thermostat part of the system is a few bucks! Don't know about the stuff required to get a low-voltage system to control household current. You would need a computer and software to control the whole thing though, since the ICs are pretty stupid. I've been meaning to get my chip-designer buddy to help me with this, but he's always busy doing stuff for Apple. And I'm primarily a software guy so it would take me forever to get the electronics going....