Silly Questions on Housing From a Newbie

[Jazi]

Long-time lurker here, finally registered when I had a few questions that didn't seem to be answered by my usual method of sniffing around. I bought my boy (6.5mos/24in/250g) from ReptileRapture about 1.5 months ago and plopped him in the 55gal that I got off of craigslist bundled with a lot of starter supplies for $80. I'm now aware that it's too big for him and properly cluttered it up with several hide options to keep him feeling secure.

This is the set-up I have currently, sans a hide as I was in the process of upgrading his warm one since he outgrew the last set:


And with the towel...


I'm aware that the first picture displays temperatures way off the mark; without the towel his temps and humidity plummet to the ambient in my apartment, and I have no control over that as it's hooked through a central system my landlord controls for everyone in the house. With the towel his warm spot registers at 88-92, ambient 77-82, cool 73-75, humidity 60-45% before I refresh it, 70-55% during shed. And yes, he is on my dining room table Only place that a 48x18x12 fits in a small 1br.

Which brings me to my point; I've been looking into saving some money to buy the Animal Plastics T3 with lock and light to make regulating his humidity not so much of a pain in the butt. Refreshing the substrate and dampening the towel every other day isn't that annoying, but I feel bad for him every time I open the tank to spot clean or feed him since there's so much fluctuation once the towel is gone. I'm not sure if it's stressing him out, I'd assume not as he hides well, eats well, first shed was fantastic and in 1 piece, seems to be plumping up nicely, and has remained laidback and docile even through my rookie mistakes.

With the T3's design am I still going to have the same fluctuation as soon as I slide the doors open, or will that hopefully fix the issue? And, stupid question time, will I be able to use my spare unopened ZooMed UTH (made for a 55gal) or will I need to use their heat tape? Stupid questions #2-10, but I'm a bit confused about heat tape in general and how it differs from a UTH... is it built into the enclosure? Do you need to fasten it to something? How would you keep it from burning furniture or perhaps other pets that might be too curious for their own good, like a cat? I'm over here imagining a bare coiled piece of wire taped to the outside walls.

In the same line of questioning, I've got the Hydrofarm thermostat that every newbie owner apparently is drawn to, which according to this forum is a piece of junk. What are the reasons behind that? The only problem I've seen is that I can set the thermostat to 100ºF and my temp gun says the temperature of the substrate is 92. Normal? Or is that the reason the thing is supposed to be a POS? If so, would an upgrade to the Herpstat Intro fix the issue of my thermostat lying to me?

Sorry for the tl;dr post and the legions of possibly really dumb questions. I figured the more information I had about my current setup, the better idea you guys would have on what I could do to improve it.