I would think that that only applies to light bulbs or actual heaters. Flexwatt should hold up fine, either way. It basically means that something like a light bulb will last a very long time (longer than the number of hours you are supposed to be able to get out of it) if you are running it constantly at a dimmed (proportional) level, while if you turn it on and off 40x per day at full power, it will likely burn out a lot quicker. I'd imagine space heaters and such would be the same, but if you are using something as simply constructed as Flexwatt, it probably won't matter as far as the life of the heat tape is concerned, but it's still better to use the proportional setting if you have it. It just stays more consistent than on/off, and I'm pretty sure that it uses a lot less electricity to run it at a low wattage non-stop than it takes to turn it on to full power all the time.
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