Question on ceramic bulbs

[Dylan_]

When I had my guy in a rack.. I set a space heater up to a thermostat which would kick it on whenever it got below 78.. just make sure the thermostat can handle wattage of space heater.


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Dont have an extra thermostat dont have any money to get one right this moment

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[Coluber42]

Dont have an extra thermostat dont have any money to get one right this moment

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If you're on a budget, don't use a space heater. You can buy them for not too much and you might even have one already, but add up a few months of electric bills and heating an entire room when you really only need to heat a few cubic feet of it makes a lot less sense. That's even more true if you start talking about raising the thermostat in your entire house.

A 1500-watt space heater run 24/7 could cost $3-4 per day. Even if it only has to run half the time to raise the room temperature to where you need it, that's still at least $1.50 per day or $45 per month. People complain that RHP's are expensive, but a 80-watt RBI panel costs the same as running that space heater for only two months. Obviously the 80-watt panel isn't free to run, but running it 24/7 is still barely more than a tenth of the cost of running a 1500-watt space heater 12 hours per day. A space heater is a fine band-aid solution for when your equipment fails or you're waiting for shipments or whatever, but it is NOT a long term budget solution!

The reason I recommend to err on the side of a higher wattage CHE if you're unsure is that it's better to have more capacity than you need just in case the room temperature drops more than you think. If you need ~45 watts of output to get the temperature you need most of the time, then most of the time a 50 watt CHE will be fine. So will a 75 watt one, or a 100 watt one. They'll all work, because the thermostat will regulate it, so it won't really matter much which one you have. But if it gets colder and now 50 watts of output isn't enough, the thermostat can't turn your 50 watt bulb into a 75 watt bulb. It's cheaper to just buy the 100 watt one in the first place than to buy the 50 watt one, discover that on the coldest days it isn't enough, and then go buy another one.