Heating

[Auddi01]

I am building a lot of melamine cages and am going to keep all of my snakes in my basement. I plan on using heat tape to heat the cages(most of them). I have a hman heat pad also i plan on using. But i have run into a problem and need your help. IS their a way to control the temperatures of all the cages without having seperate thermostats for each heating device( which will be extremely expensive!) I am going to have them in my baseent whgere temperature drops are quite common, so a rheostat is not an option. Please help me
thanks in advance

[Linds]

YOu can wire all your heat tape together and then into the thermostat, I have no experience with this but have seen it done. I'm not electrically inclined so I can't tell you how safe this is either. Another common method is to plug them all into an outlet extender/powerbar and then plug/wire that into the thermostat.

[Auddi01]

on a thermostat there is one heat sensor present, is that correct? if i have that one heat sensor in a cage, it is going to display the temperature of that cage. Since there will only be one sensor the thermostat will not know the temperature of the other aquariums, right? SO will that be accurate? will it be able to cut off each peice of heat tape when vere it becomes too hot, or will it cut them all off when the cage with the sensor in it becomes too hot? thanks for your help Linds, buit i am still confused. I am new at this.
thanks Austin

[Big Mike]

I also don't have any experience with this but assuming that each enclosure is similar then the same lenght of heat tape for each enclosure should produce a similar resulting temperature. So if you place the probe in one enclosure and then plug/wire all similar enclosures to the one thermostat...in theory is should work. Proper measureing of the temps would of course be required.

I think that some of the most popular thermostats are 500-1500 watt capacity (maybe more for good ones). If you take the watt per foot rating of the heat tape and multiply by the legth of heat tape you will be using then you can work out if you need more than one thermostat.

[Auddi01]

actually, i have 2 glass cages i am going to use that are the same size, and i have 1 critter cage that is a 55 gallon that i plan on using, i am building the rest out of melamine...so is there a way that i can calculate hom much heat tape to use for the vivariums? taking into consideration their dimesnions, and insulation? I undertsand what you are saying mike, but i am not sure i can make them match up the same temps, since the cages are diferent sizes and since made of different materials...
any other ideas?

[Linds]

The methods I described are only effective on heating similar enclosures with same amounts of heat tape on each one. The setup you described cannot all be controlled via one thermostat.

[Auddi01]

oh ok, thx guys, is there anything i can do, besides buying a seperate thermostat for each of them then?

[Lisa]

you could use rheostats on each enclosure. I would recomend this because heat tape can vary in temperature in spots. at most i would put 2 similar enclosures on the same rheostat. don't forget temperatures are going to vary with the placement of the cage in the room too, a cage that's higher up will be naturely warmer then a cage near the floor. Best would be a thermostat for each enclosure but that would be pricy.

[Chris Steele]

Actually, I think it might be possible with one therm.
Heat tape can be cut, right? Well I think it can, if so, then you can put a large peice on each cage. Then, you turn it all on. After the cages are heated, you see which ones are right and which ones are hot (put plenty of tape so that you don't start off with cages that dont have enought...well you could always switch tapes from cage to cage if one wasn't warm enought. Ok, well the ones that are to hot, clip some tape off and then try it again...repeat until all of the cage temperatures are about right. It would probably take A LONG time, but I think that is one way to do it. Then, keeping the thermostat in one cage, if you have it in the right spot should work. I haven't tried this, but it is probably what I will do before I try getting more than one thermostat. I know it wouldn't keep the cages at exactly the right temp, but I think it would probably keep them within 5-8 degrees.

[Darlene]

Has anyone tried these ideas yet ?
i'm interested to know if someone has a working method yet.