Heat control for flex watt

[Up_North]

I am bulding a rack for my leo's I am useing rubbermaid contaners to house them in. I plan to heat them with 3 or 4 inch flexwatt. I am told I need something to control the temp. of the tape. I have seen pics of others cages, the temp. controlers all just look like normal dimer switches! Is this all I need to wire in? Any other sugestond would be helpful for my new project!

[Stockwell]

Dimmers are commonly used, but are only suitable if your surrounding ambient(room temp) is fairly stable. See, a dimmer reduces the electricity going to the heat tape, but it doesn't do this based on heat.. There is no feed back from the environment. So as your room temp goes up and down, so will the cage temp. This can be dangerous if for example your summer temps climb up into the 80's. The dimmer had no way of detecting this, and will continue to provide the same power... This could bake your animals.

The best, yet more expensive way, involves a thermostatic type control which has a sensor(usually a probe) to actually monitor the cage temp. This will compensate for room temperature variations.
Helix controls and numerous other brands can be used for this, but they can be a couple hundred or more, which is alot compared to a 6 dollar dimmer.

Dimmers will work if you have central air, and your house temperature is fairly stable both night and day and winter and summer.

A third rarely used technique(the poormans way) is to simply adjust the distance between the flexwatt and the cage. I have done this with gecko cages where the heat tape is mounted on a board behind the rubbermaid. The heat tape has full power on it( 6 watt 3 inch only, never the 10watt)
I simply move the board holding the heat tape closer or furthur away until I get the back of the rubbermaid the temp I want.
As stated above, this method is only stable if your room temp is stable, and many are not.