If you watch my youtube channel (www.youtube.com/kelfezond) you'll know that in 2-3 weeks I'm being given another room to expand my reptile breeding. The room isn't huge (I'd say about 9ft x 12ft guesstimations!) but I can probably fit a fair few royal racks in to up the breeding and make the collection a bit bigger.
However I'm stuck on heating... I was originally going to stick with what I'm using now. Basic rubs with heat mats controlled by a single thermostat (PP) which is fine. But then thought about the electric bill (which is already through the roof) and thought that maybe, if I sold all my racks and bought instead simple ones, no heating, not lids, just basically a plastic filing cabinet (much like the ones on SnakeBytes TV) I could instead buy an electric or oil heater for the whole room. Would probably work out cheaper for electric and I could even help that out by adding heat reflective tape to the walls and draught excluders to the door etc.
Howdever I'm not sure what having that kind of heating in one room would do, would it have any effect on the next room? Or even the building?
Ideas? Suggestions?
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im not sure that would work because different parts of the rack will have different temps. couldnt you get an extra long heat cable and use it for as many racks as it would allow.
you could (if space allows) have two racks back to back so in a sense heating 2 racks with one stone (so to speak)
1.0.0 Lesser - Helios 2.0.0 Normal - George & Kairo 1.0.0 Mojave - Bolt 0.1.0 Mojave - Roxi 1.0.0 Leopard Gecko - Leo 0.0.1 Crocodile gecko - Pheonix
im not sure that would work because different parts of the rack will have different temps. couldnt you get an extra long heat cable and use it for as many racks as it would allow.
you could (if space allows) have two racks back to back so in a sense heating 2 racks with one stone (so to speak)
Aye heat cable is an option but it does require me to build/buy more racks initially than I really wanted to. I'm not going to expand quickly so having to buy enough racks to make use of a large cable will be a big cost up-front.
As for the temperature if the room was being heated with a thermostat the ambient temperature should be okay.
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Good polystyrene tiles should hold the heat in without affecting the rest of the house. If the room was very thermally efficient you could heat the room to say 26oC and then the cable doesn't have as much work to do to achieve the 32oC hot end temp so should use less electric to do that. The initial heating of the room will cost a fortune but once its up to temp the heater you use wont need to work so hard. Windows are your downfall though, they are hideously inefficient, you can buy false windows/screens to go in front of the window to hold the heat in a bit better.
Finding the cheaper over time option!
Posted - 22/07/2012 : 11:57:15
