Herpstat or rheostat?

[Neal]

I hesitated to respond to this question because I knew one of you would say this (& you're wrong & you don't know me-!) but that's why I qualified carefully
what I said. I'm busy & I'll leave it at that for now. I just felt that the information given was a bit one-sided...rheostats do have their uses. I would however
stay far away from the cheap brands I've seen in pet stores (can't remember specific brand, tried one ages ago), ironically they do seem to have issues, if
one can generalize from a single poor quality item (& for safety, one should).

I actually did not say that beofre, but I will say it now. You're wrong. I wasn't calling you out, nor was I pointing the finger at you. I'm referring to new keepers who don't want to buy thermostats and run ceramic heat emitters or other types of heating that can get hot enough to kill and want to run a rheostat versus actually running a thermostat which is what those types of equipment are supposed to be ran on. Yes you running it on heat tape is a bad call, but I never called you out on that until now.

In the end, if a rheostat fails, all the ones that I've seen fail, get put at 100% power, and if you're using it for a heating device that can kill the snake. If it fails and somehow gets 0% power, then that's not going to kill the snake, but I've yet to see that happen. Herpstat and VE have fail safes, if something goes wrong, they cut power so your snake doesn't die. That's proper equipment. No matter how much you spend on a rheostat it can't account for outside variables like a thermostat can.

As I stated, it was summer time when my thermostat for my AC in my house broke. I had some stuff on rheostats but some stuff on a thermostat. The snake room with all the heating quickly got into the 80's, now factor in the rheostats were set to the temp when the room is 72, that's an 8 degree difference in ambient temp. Now the rheostats are still going to put out the power, so that hotspot that you had set to say 90, is now 98 and it's going to steadily climb.

So yes, if you're using a rheostat for anything heat related, or if anybody is using that, it's a lack of having proper equipment.