Temperature Issues With an Animal Plastics Rack

Hey everyone,

I recently acquired an animal plastics rack and decided to finally set it up and get some use out of it. With that said I set it up and have since been having constant troubles with the temperatures. I am using a Herpstat 2 as my thermostat and my ambient temperature is 80 degrees.
This animal plastics rack has the slots in the back of the shelves to insert the probe rather than attaching it to the heat tape itself. When I set the probe in this slot, I can get a constant 83-84 degrees cool side but my hotspot is all over the place. Currently my thermostat is set to 84.2 and when using this setting my cools side stays at a constant 83-84 degrees ambient temperature with a surface temperature of about 82-83 degrees. With this same setting, the hotspot across the tub ranges from 88-97 degrees. The temperatures seems to mostly stick around 90-93 degrees but some spots read at 97 degrees sometimes and other spots sometimes read at 88 degrees.
Why is there such a huge gradient across the portion of the tub that all sits on the heat tape? The temperature gun I use is a pro exotics pe-2. The temperature gun seems to be reading correctly so I’m confident that it is not an error of the temperature gun.
Any suggestions? Sorry for the wall of text. There is a bug with internet explore for me that doesn't allow me to use the [return] key to properly format my posts. I normally use Chrome or Firefox but both of them keep giving me the suspicious site page every time I try to submit my post so I can't use those until the site issue is fixed. Thanks.

The ambient temps are more less the room temp for the most part. I am assuming you have belly heat which is on the floor. I would reccomend running the tstat probe to a spot directly on the heat tape where the tub won't knock it off like on the side of the tub and tape it down real good so it doesn't get moved. Flex watt will vary a bit but in my experience it is most accurate when probe is directly on it on a black bar on flexxwatt. Then I like to run a digital thermometer with a probe inside the tub to check accuracy and dial in my temps by adjusting tstat . Usually the temperature on the tstat will be set a few degrees higher than the actual temperature in the tub. I like to run it overnight to get it to settle in before I feel ready to add snakes.

Yes to me that sounds like the best idea as that is what has always worked in the past. I was more curious as to how people do with using the notch that is made for the probe in these Animal Plastic racks. I really like the feature but I just don't see it keeping temperatures where they need to be all that well. At least for me that is. Thanks for the reply.

I'm not familiar with the AP racks, but are you sure you're inserting the probe far enough into the slot?

I have several AP racks and love them. With that being said I have never been able to use the probe slots. What you describe is exactly the results I was getting. Just tape the probe directly on the heat tape. I think the problem with the slot is that the heat tape doesn't actually touch the probe so it heats up far hotter that you set temp to get the probe to your desired temp.

Thanks everyone. Yes my probe was in the whole way. Just like zues said, I think it is just because the probe cannot come in contact with the heat tape itself when you use the probe slot. I am just going to tape it onto the heat tape like the other racks. Really like the construction and idea behind this rack, just wish the probe slot worked well but no biggie.