Thermostat setups?

[Eric Alan]

Placement of probe doesn't really matter.

The placement of the probe is very important - it's what sets your thermostat up for success. If it's not placed correctly, the thermostat doesn't have a snowball's chance to work properly.

What you are monitoring is your temp in the cage.

When using a UTH, what you a actually monitoring is the temp of your heating element.

So if you want your hot side set at 92 degrees, then wherever your probe is, you set your thermostat to whatever it needs to be so your air temp is measuring 92.

When using a UTH, you set it to whatever it needs to be so the floor above the UTH, not the air, is measuring the temperature you want it to be.

If you are using it with an under tank heater, then you would put the probe between the pad and the tank.

Correct! This placement tends to give the most accurate and consistent results.

You should only plug in one device to your thermostat, unless it is designed to accept more.

It is perfectly fine to plug in multiple identical heating elements into a single thermostat as long as they don't overload the thermostat's max load.

I use a Hydrofarm with a ceramic heat emitter. You can get them on Ebay for around $35. The more expensive brands are nice too, just depends on what you want to use and what the model offers. For me, the Hydrofarm has always worked well.

The brand you mentioned is certainly a decent budget thermostat. I prefer to recommend the Spyder Robotics Herpstats for their safe and consistent reliability.