This is sort of a pet peeve of mine - so much of the heating advice seems to assume you heat your house considerably warmer than almost anyone I know in my area. I shudder to think of what my heating bill would look like if I tried to keep even one room at a constant 70° all winter.Originally Posted by JoshSloane
Yes, you can use space heaters or zones if your heating system has them, but that's a considerable energy expenditure when all you really need to do is heat a handful of cubic feet where the snake lives. Big heat panels are expensive, but they are way cheaper than heating a whole room, let alone heating a whole house to 70° even during the workday when no one's home. Given a rough national average price of electricity, a 1000-watt space heater costs something on the order of $25/mo to run full time, and lots of the frequently recommended oil-filled heaters are more like 1500 watts. A 120-watt RBI panel costs 88% less in electricity, so the difference in the power bill alone adds up to the cost of the panel within just a few months.
At the moment, I use an 80-watt RHP on a 20-long tank (with foam around three sides plus the bottom) and it maintains perfect even ambient temperature, even though in the winter the room temperature can drop to 55° during the workday.
The TL;DR is: If you can afford the energy bill to heat the whole room, you can afford to buy insulation and as big an RHP as you need in order to heat just the enclosure instead.
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