rheostats...dimming small amounts of heat tape

[ross2k]

Hi guys...first post!

Anyway I have a couple display tanks and I'm building a rack next week all of which use very little heat tape. Actually all 5 of my units use exactly 40 watts of heat. And unfortunatly only two of them can be combined. As you may have guessed the usual 600w dimmers don't work well at all.

Can anyone recommend lower wattage dimmers or something else? Still can't afford helix or big apple herp...Oh, and I have an Alife thermostat which acts as an excess heat cut off.

Thanks in advance,
Ross

[ross2k]

Anyone know anything about the ohms of heat tape? I did some research and didnt manage to come up with anything. But for my purposes (40w strips) this rheostat looks like it'd be perfect:

http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=search&item=RHE-25&type=store

I'm not so sure about the whole 2 ohm thing though.

Anyone know about this stuff?

Thanks,
Ross

[Syst3m]

I'm not sure you understand the heat tape. 600w rheostat will handle UP TO 600w. You probably are using the 4 inch stuff and have to low of wattage for what you want. I currently run 1 foot of 4 inch flex watt for one cage on a 600w rheostat. Works great. If you could explain a little more about What your trying to do what you are working with and what is happening wrong we can try and troubleshoot it for you.

[ross2k]

Well actually until now I've been using the 11", but that really doesn't matter.

I'm using 40w total amounts of it in any instance. On a 600w dimmer I noticed that with most of the settings I either had full juice, or completely off. I found almost no median.

But I think I may have found the solution, I've been using the same 40w length with a 300w slide dimmer and its considerably better. I've located a 200w slide dimmer at home depot which should prove even better. Also there is a supposed 150w slider on bean farms site, but its been down all day so I couldn't check.

I'm gonna get a couple different dimmers and see what the deal is as far as accuracy. I'll be using 4" heat tape on my new rack I'm working on.

The reason I'm trying to dim accuratly is because my BRB's temps we're getting a little too high. But I've finally got it where I want it, I think it'd be even easier with lower wattage dimmers.

[Syst3m]

I use single sheets of the 11" and strips of the 4 inch for all of my brazilians and my Columbian rainbows, And I don't have any problems keeping stable temps. I Usually have to keep it about 3/4 of the way up, and that seems to do fine. I usually plug a 40 watt bulb into it and test it out to see where I get juice at. I think its just the fact that the 600 watt dimmers have a very small operating range, put a light bulb into it and You will understand what I mean, only about 1/2 of the dimmer maybe 1/3rd of the dimmer actually produces any light. You can try lower watt dimmers, if that solves your problem more power to you.