Heat control

[brookec]

To heat our 20 gal. long tank for our geckos I currently have a UTH and a heat lamp. We keep our house really cool in the winter so both were on all the time to keep a temp around 90 on the warm side in the day and around 80 at night. Now that the weather has warmed up I've stopped using the heat lamp. But I really think we need to control this better. What's the best product to get that will control both items and tell me how it works, where I should get it and cost.
Thanks!

 

[acpart]

If you can achieve 90 degrees (on the floor of the tank) all year round with the UTH alone it would be best. In that case you have 2 choices for temp control:

a. thermostat which would work like the one at your house. It has a probe that goes on the floor of the tank to measure heat and the thermostat turns on and off as needed. The general cheap one is made by Alife or ESU (they seem the same to me) and is somewhere between $20-30. Some people say they've had problems with them but I've been fine.

b. rheostat or dimmer. In this case, you measure the temp and then adjust the rheostat to control how much heat the heater puts out. You can get a lamp rheostat from HOme Depot for about $11. The main disadvantage is that every time the room temp changes, so will the heat temp since the rheostat doesn't change with the changing room temp.

I guess if you want to theoretically control both, you would use a thermostat plugged into your UTH with the heat lamp shining on the probe as well. If the temp gets too high,the UTH will shut off until the heat goes down in which case all the heat will be supplied by the heat lamp.

I hope all this makes sense.

Aliza

 

[efx*]

When I kept geckos in tanks I used the Repti Temp 500R, It worked great, you just have to keep an eye on it every now and than..

http://www.bizrate.com/reptilesupplies/oid721030161__nwylf--.html