pretend.....

...yet I've used many hydrofarms for years and they're all still going strong. Any thermostat can fail*. Sometimes it's not about how it will be cheaper in the long run, but shelling out a large sum at once. Someday I will have a Herpstat. I know they're quality products. However, I honestly haven't seen a reason to upgrade at this point.

-----quietly sneaks out of thread------

*And yes, I realize the more advanced herpstats have fail-safes to prevent DANGEROUS failure. They can still fail.

Is not that a better tstat has no risk of failing, its that it has less chance of failing. Also when it fails its how it does it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KMG

Is not that a better tstat has no risk of failing, its that it has less chance of failing. Also when it fails its how it does it.

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Fair enough.

maybe you could hack something together on your own.

when it comes to individual heat sensors, im sure they dont ost more than 50 cents per peace. But you still need integrated circuits to interpret the signal coming from these, and convert it to a temperature scale, and implement two triggers, one to switch off heating above a certain temperature, one to switch on heating below a certain temperature. These two need to be different, otherwise you might get a system that switches between on and off at a really high frequency. All of that would need to be implemented directly in hardware, hard to do unless you really studied it an are an electronics expert. Once you have a layout, you need to get all the parts and weld together all the connections and then test it and so on.

In the end maybe you can make thermostats yourself.... anf if you can do that it will be easy to implement using it to control any heating device.

My dad could do it, but he works as an electronics engineer in scientific research and designs and manufactures custom electronic control and measurement devices for them, and he wont do it because it would take weeks of his spare time and when he does that kind of stuff at work he gets a fat paycheck at the end of the month.

And for them he does stuff like building a rotating platform that can be rotated using a motor so that a crystal can be mounted on it and can be rotated by small angles from the outside, in a confined space cooled with superfluid helium to around 3 degrees above absolute zero. around 3 kelvin or -270 celsius (fahrenheit is meaningless in that context, noone uses it).


So, no, even if you could build it yourself.... you wouldnt, you would use that ability to earn money and just buy a working product.

dont cut corners on thermometers / thermostats / heating. Or if you do, have an independent system that monitors temperatures and triggers an alarm if a certain temperaure treshold gets surpassed, but that would be more expensive than to just use a proper system for heating that on its own wont overheat.

And yes, how it fails is more important than how often it fails. Snakes can survive one or two cold nights, if heating fails by disabling itself and not heating anymore. The problem are the failures when it fails to switch off and heats indefinitely and burns the snake / melts plastic / kills the snake / sets fire to your house. After heat rocks burned reptiles for decades, there now are some that fail safe, meaning they only fail in one way: By switching themself off. They turn cold, not hot, when they fail. Quality heating systems and thermostats have that built in. Cheap ones dont have it. And you want either such fail safe mechanisms, or devices that will have an extremely low overall chance of failure. The cheapest ones dont have it and fail a lot.

I plugged the Hydrofarm into a lamp dimmer. I assume it will fail at some point and I'd rather it not go above around 110.