Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Planning on devoting half of my garage to a new room.
Has anyone tried radiant heat with water from a water heater?
I just thought it would be a great back up during a power outage if I used a natural gas water tank.

Are you planning to flow the water through a pipe under the snake's cage or are you planning to have the water open to the cage? Are you planning to recycle the water back to the water heater?

If you run the water through tubing under (or against the back of) the snake's cage, this setup will likely work about as well as any other kind of heating. You'll have to adjust the insulation so that you don't make a hot spot that's too hot for the snake, but you should get a nice, consistent heat. I don't say this from experience. It just sounds as if it should work.

Another intriguing concept would be to have the hot water running through an open trough that was isolated to keep the snake from contacting water that's too hot for him but that allowed moist air rising from the water to enter the snake's cage. If you could build something like that, you would get great humidity in the cage. You'd need to fiddle with some variables to keep the cage from becoming too humid, but I've often wanted to figure out a way to add humidity through some similar scheme.

Whether you recycle the water is one question that you must consider. In some high-end houses, they circulate the hot water at all times so that when you turn on hot water at the faucet, you have immediate hot water without having to wait for cool water in the pipes to come out. I've never studied these systems, but I'd be interested in seeing whether they do anything special to keep the water from becoming corrosive. I know that closed, recirculating water systems in chemical plants need to be treated to control corrosion. In a regular hot water heater, you usually don't build up concentrations of anything because you are regularly flowing water from the tank and replacing it with new water from wherever your house gets its water. If you were to close the system, you might concentrate some chemicals that could make the water more corrosive to your hot water heater.

Of course, if you're just taking a small slipstream from the heater that you are using for all of your other household hot water uses, then the amount of recycle won't be enough to notice. If you were dedicating a small hot water heater to running a circulating system, it's a factor that I would consider.

Bill

Thanks for the reply!
What I planned was a closed system through pipes in the subfloor to maintain ambient temps in the room and use belly heat with heat tape. The corrosion factor is a good point and will have to consider fluid type, maybe distilled water or ethelyne glycol ?
I was figuring using a seperate water heater that uses natural gas. What I have learned is radiant heat takes days to comne up to temp but will also maintain temp for a long time. If a power failure occured I would only lose my belly heat. I would have a back up system for the radiant heat of radiant electric oil heater set on a thermostat 10 degrees below the radiant floor heat just in case a failure of the floor heat.Thanks for your opinions , thats why I love this board . Its like having a think tank at your disposal.