You can always install it temporarily and try it in various places to see what will work. I suspect you'll find that with only a single heat source, you can figure out a setup that will work when the house is at one temperature, but not when the house temperature changes. So you might have to revisit things when spring comes, depending on what your room and your cage are like. Any setup you come up with will be more likely to work for a wider range of room temperatures if the cage is well insulated.
Think of it this way: a styrofoam box with walls 3" thick would take very little energy to heat, and it wouldn't make that much diffference whether it was in a 50 degree room or a 75 degree room. A small heat source on one side would heat the whole thing very nicely with probably a pretty small temperature difference from one side to the other. Now picture a rabbit cage made of chicken wire. In a 75 degree room, you might get the far side up to 80 degrees by heating the near side to 95 degrees or whatever; but in a 50 degree room, you would have to heat the near side to way more than 95 degrees in order to get the far side to 80.
So experiment and see what you get; but you'll have an easier time of it if you insulate the bejeezus out of your cage. Lots of things work as insulation. Blankets, for example, make great insulation. That's why we cover ourselves with them at night.
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