Thank you everyone for your help!!

Quote Originally Posted by sopa View Post
Your hot glue gun idea sounds like great, but do you have plans on what to do to clean? Would you just leave it in there and clean out your tank, or would you take it out and hot glue it back? I currently just have mine sitting where my bp is usually laying so I can tell if she gets too hot or not.
(cut some off so the post isn't too long!)

I use coconut husk substrate and have a large water bowl. I've heard of some people getting mites from cypress mulch, but not everyone gets mites from that and I think you can buy the organic one from Home Depot. That would be much cheaper than buying coconut husk substrate.
For the hot glue gun (if I end up doing that), I think what I'd do is end up leaving the probe there and cleaning around it! It'd just be a small dot of glue, so the probe should still be flexible enough to pick up the cord and get under everything but the glue itself. Thanks for your advice on the cypress mulch, I'm thinking that I might want to kind of poke around Home Depot's gardening section and my local pet store and see if they'll let me open a bag and feel the substrate and maybe that way I can decide for myself which kind feels better.

Quote Originally Posted by Darkbird View Post
I wouldn't watse the money on any petstore light bulb. Though it will cost more initially, I would recommend a ceramic heat emitter on a second thermostat to control ambient temps. Then it will not matter if the room temps fluctuate a bit, and you can get a low enough wattage CHE so that if the t-stat fails on, it won't cook the cage.
You make a good point there, thank you! What wattage would you suggest for a 36x18x16 terrarium? Like I said, room temperature around my house tends to be somewhere around 75F, so I'd be looking to get the ambient temperatures up a good eight or ten degrees. An associate at my local pet store said that with a UTH, I'd need no more than 50 or 60w but considering that it's a large chain store, I'm not exactly sure how much I trust their expertise, so I figured I'd ask here too

Also, I've read that CHEs can really take a pretty hefty toll on the humidity of a terrarium, do they really? And how do you go about handling that, other than covering parts of the tank? Would it be enough to do occasional misting, or maybe put some damp sphagnum moss in the corners?

Thanks again, everyone!