Quote Originally Posted by SDA View Post
I have an 80 watt for my 4 foot cage and a 40 watt for my 2 foot cage and the thermostat for both is placed directly under the RHP. For my terrestrial setup i use under tank heating to get the hot spot because it make no sense in a cooler house to expect radiant heating to handle that task. For my 2 foot arboreal setup I use the same thermostat setup but I only concern myself with the hot spot on the perch below the RHP. That is 1 degree warmer than the set thermostat temperature due to the way radiant heating works and how I have the thermostat set.

Both main vendors do the exact same thing so one will not work more efficiently than the other. You also can't expect to heat efficiently once the room temperature drops below a certain temperature no matter what you may think. You can safely keep the thermostat in the house set to 69 and expect your RHPs to handle their job provided you have properly built enclosures like those out of PVC but if you drop to say 65 or lower, no RHP is going to out pace the cold of the room and it will always heat to 100%

Think about it, 60 degrees is pretty cold and you are expecting a small radiant heat source to outpace a room that will stay at 60 degrees. If you keep your house that cold, insulate your enclosure better, don't go hog wild and over power it with a giant RHP, it won't do any good.
I was just wondering if there was a sweet spot to keep the 'room' thermostat at to make sure the RHP was doing it's job and that sounds like it's between 65 - 69.

Everything else you said makes sense except for the part about not to expect the RHP to handle the hot spot. Unless you're trying to say that there's not need to overwork the RHP if a UTH is available. I'm planning to continue to use mine.