Like mentioned, it depends on your set up and ambient temps in the house. If your house is kept fairly warm, then a RHP isnt going to work great for you. If your house gets cold, you will love them. For me, like i said, I keep my house around 77-79F in the winter and the basement stays a bit warmer as it is partially underground. Both methods will work. I mean Gio, JMCrook and i believe Stern uses RHPs with no flexwatt where as I use only flexwatt. The same goes for a guy named Skip Frye who breeds a lot of Surinames. We were talking and we both use pretty much the exact same set up. He has a t-stat to run his oil filled room radiator which i dont have yet but will be picking up a Herpstat HP this fall to run my oil filled raidator too. If your hosue is 102F, dont forget to turn down your flexwatt and other heat as snakes can be kind of dumb and not realize they are sitting on the heat overheating lol.