I went to home depot once looking for hardware cloth while building mouse breeding racks, the very polite person who tried to help me suggested that I try a fabric store.

Lamp dimmers work fine for regulating heat, here is a link to a post that I wrote a while back detailing how I put together dimmers for heating my reptile cages, ---> http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...r-cheap-skates

Thermostats however are the prefered method for most people, I'm currently using a lot of the VE-200 thermostats by Vivarium Electronics I use one for each rack, they stack nicely on top of each other.