Quote Originally Posted by Alexio View Post
Just for some fast numbers here the cost of a good thermostat is around 100$. The cost of an AC needed to cool one 14x16 room 300$. The cost to run the AC for say 4 months would be probably 30 a month in electricity.
The cost of running a half power 15 watt heat mat? If you ran the mat at 7 watts per hour 24 hours a day it's 168 watts per day. Your using a 65 watt heat lamp for lets assume a 12 hour day night cycle. 780 watts per day in electricity from only the bulb.

The thermostat probe will do all the temperature adjusting for you so if the temps get higher or lower it can raise /lower the temp of the heat mat.
Some people just use ambient room temps and don't bother so much with a gradient or heat sources.
I'm not sure but I believe they shoot for temps in the 85-87 range?


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To run the UTH at half power (mine is 16w) with the thermostat would I need a rheostat hooked up to it as well? (Sorry, newb here). My tstat is just an on/off basic model, if I end up buying another bp I will upgrade to a proportional Spyder Robotics, which I've heard would be best. I've also heard bp owners swear UTHs are the devil though so I wanted to get something less costly incase I stuck with the heat lamp lol (apparently I didn't think of summer and having to manually turn the light off and on all day during peak temp times). Right now I'm just using ambient air as its 93F outside, his tank is holding pretty steady at 87F. Would you recommend I set the tstat temp lower than normal since it's not proportional incase of natural summer temp spikes?

Thank you all for your advice!!