Which Is Safter - Heat Cable or Flexwatt?

[Tanga]

With the terrible news of Marcia's friend having his house burned down due to malfunctioning electrical on his racks this has made me reluctant to start building my housing racks. Right now I'm using regular glass tanks with zoo-med UTH's, but it can get costly, especially being that the cost of UTH's is like 25 dollars EACH.

So this leads me to the question - which is the safest to use for racks? Heat cable or flexwatt?
What are the advantages/disadvantages of each?

 

[acpart]

I don't really have racks. HOwever, I use heat cable for a lot of my tanks. I haven't personally used flexwatt, but have read on the forums of a number of instances where hot spots in the flexwatt have melted plastic. I haven't heard of any problems with heat cable. Once I got a new zoo-med heat cable and discovered that instead of the part just past the plug being "cold" and the part further up being "warm" it was the opposite. I called the company and after I sent back the defective heat cable they sent me a new one.

Aliza

 

[Golden Gate Geckos]

I use commercial UTH's for my tanks, and all my racks have heat cable. I have had 2 'melt-downs' over the years with heat tape, and one of those times I went into the gecko room and smelled buring wood... and found that the heat tape had overheated, melted th plastic surrounding it, and the shelf the tank was on was smoldering.

The tragedy that Tony experienced could happen to ANY of us, and quite frankly I have had a difficult time sleeping the past 2 nights worrying about a fire. I have decided to get an electrician in here and install a separate breaker box just for my gecko room, and will have ground-fault interrupter outlets installed.

 

[thestack510]

A wise choice MOGL. I am so paranoid about something going wrong, even before I heard about what happened to Tony, that I am also taking some preventative measures.