Building a rack - Planning heat

[Drift]

Hi,

I'm currently drawing up plans for building my first rack setup, and I'm trying to figure out my heating.

I'm planning a 4-6 shelf rack. I will PROBABLY be using a herpstat 2 thermostat, but may squeeze out a budget for a herpstat 4 if I really need it to make things work.

Belly heat seems like it would be a bit easier to ensure that the snakes are getting the full-body heat they need. There is a warm spot that covers a known area of the tub, and is kept so that area is a known temperature.

However, I'm not crazy about the idea of snaking a single strip of flexwatt through all my shelves (if the flexwatt fails, the whole rack fails), but I also recognize that the cost of putting a thermostat probe for each shelf is going to add up quickly after 2 shelves. Otherwise if I use a 'master' that's monitored and used to determine the temperatures for each shelf, the unregulated snakes may get burnt if that master fails. I will not risk burnt snakes.

I'm not opposed to back-heating, but with back-heating I'd have a more gradual temperature gradient. The back may be warm enough, but how far from the back will that warmth carry? My main concern is, will the snake be stuck trying to thermoregulate itself with part of its body still in the cooler temperatures of the gradient? This also doesn't really solve the issue of "flexwatt dies, whole rack left unheated".

I'm leaning towards maybe doing a mix of back AND belly heat? This way if one flexwatt dies, I still have something for heat, but I don't have to worry about anyone getting burnt. Would the electricity be that bad? I'd imagine they would work together so they would more or less use the same amount of electricity because they would both be running at lower power than if they were used on their own. Or maybe set the back-heat to a lower temperature so it would only kick in if something happened to the belly heat?

If anyone has any suggestions I maybe haven't considered, or could lend their opinions/experiences I'd really appreciate it. Maybe I just don't have enough faith in the flexwatt? I've never used the stuff, but I'd rather plan things out now than find myself scrambling for a patch-fix with a bunch of snakes and no heating.

[anneplath]

I built an enclosed rack just this year and went with the single continuous peice of heat tape for belly heat. I'm actually using an analogue thermostat at the moment. It's been running perfectly fine, no heat spikes and the tubs are heated pretty evenly. I have the probe on the middle tub and messed around with the thermostat to get to an average of 90 right on top of the heat tape. The fronts of the tubs get to be in the 80's and all of my ball pythons thermoregulate fine, cruising to the font and back at times. Everything was checked and double checked with a temp gun before move in, of course.

The only problem I've had insofar is of my own doing, my screwing in of the shelves was a tad off so I have gaps that let the humidity get too low. I've solved this with the clever use of humid hides and none of the five living here have had a stuck shed or URI.

[AllieKin]

I built a somewhat large (two 28qt tubs per shelf) shelving system and I put one strip of heat tape per shelf. Four shelves are currently in use and one thermostat is working well for all of them; it has been very reliable. I haven't had any issues with the set-up heat-wise and now if any flexwatt fails, it won't be the whole rack system. I also have back-up heat tape in case anything happens.

There is definitely the downside of the huge amount of wiring, though. One piece of flexwatt might have been quite a bit easier to build. Also, when there is only one piece per shelf the tape tends to try to dislodge itself all the time, which gets very annoying.

Maybe when I am ready to use the rest of the shelving system I will use one really long piece of flexwatt to finish it off... Who knows?

[Drift]

Got things figured out and the rack has been running great for awhile now. I was just a little lost on the heating for multiple shelves. I ended up going with multiple strips of flexwatt all wired together and controlled off the same thermostat. It's working great.