Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I just want to post an great review of the new Herpstat 4. I can't list all incredibly cool things they programmed into this device, so I decided I would share how I used it to set up one of my Pseustes poecilonotus cages (photo included below).

The upper right part of the cage has a heat panel with probe by the rock on top of the hide basket. It is set to begin warming up at 5 am for 8 hours peaking at 97.9F by 1 pm where it stays for 3 hours and begins to cool down from 4pm to midnight getting down to 77.7F. Meanwhile there is a probe in the lower left part of the cage set to 70.7F from 9am to 9pm and 66.6F 9 pm to 9 am. To attempt to get close to these temps I have a fan pulling warm air out of a warm side vent and a fan blowing cool air into a cool end vent. Obviously right now it will not hit as low as I targeted, but once I get my basement finished, it should get a little closer. The point is to maximize thermogradient, and I certainly can't think of a better way.

Every 5 hours a reading is taken for my humidity targeted between 75% and 85%. If during any check it is below this, my misting system (see two nozzles in center) will go off for 90 seconds. In addition, at 11:30 am and 7 pm, the system will mist for 90 seconds regardless of the humidity at the time.

I had my lighting set to have the LED lights on at 1% at night to mimic moderate moonlight and at 5:30 am to 8:45 am, the light will gradually brighten to 100% where they stay until 6:00 pm where they fade back down to the 1% moonlight by 9:15 pm. Unfortunately my LED lights run on a 120v to 12v transformer and it can't handle the dimming so I need to use straight 120v lights or find a transformer that is "dimable."

Everything I mentioned can be done on the Herpstat 4 and you still have and outlet to spare to do whatever else you want to do on. And I came nowhere close to using up the watt limit pet output, so if I had more cages this size, I could have them all running the same way.

Reading over my post again, I don't think my description explained well the cool way they designed the new Herpstat 4. When my heat panel starts warming up the warm end at 5am, instead of just turning on the heat, you can program it over a duration up to 10 hours where it evenly increases the heat throughout that time to be more like a typical day with sunrise and sunset and highs in the middle of the day and lows in the middle of the night.

My cool end is set where I plug in how low I want it and I put it on a mode they programmed in called "cooling," so my fans are working off that function trying to keep it as cool as possible on that end.

If my goal was to lower humidity with the fans and not temperature, they have a feature for that too in the humidity section.

And when you have your target temps spread over a time period, it shows you what temp it is shooting for in parenthesis next to the temperature that probe is at currently, and how much energy (by percent) is being given to your heating or cooling device at that time.

If there was an award for contribution to the Herp Keeper world, my vote would go to the Herpstat 4 after playing with this product for a day.

That sounds amazing! I also like the cool backlit display. I always wanted a way to simulate sunrise and sunset. I hated turning the lights full on in the morning and visa versa. Not only am I excited about what this will do for the health of the animals but I'm also excited to see what different natural behaviors we'll be able to see with a more natural temperature/photoperiod being produced.

Thanks for introducing me to this!

Terry