Hey,


Glad to hear your making headway - takes me forever to plan these things

You will definately need a convertor to use the flexwatt over here if it's rated 120v (o.n.d. in electronics ) sadly I don't know offhand how much they run to or where you would get them - will have a look later. Don't try and use it without any convertors without asking an electrician as it's highly likely it will either seriously overheat or burst into flames.

Could you find out what the wattage was on the 15 foot of flexwatt? - the higher the wattage/foot obviously the higher possible temps.

The other point of that being you are limited on the amount of flexwatt per shelf to the 2'-3' under the tank and a possible 8" on the back. If the wattage is high enough ( or your rooms ambients high enough) then obviously that isn't really an issue. The reason I was considering the cable is I can have from about one foot to probably around fifteen foot or so under each tub if needed -though if it turns out to be the latter I may need to put on a balaclava and go make a bank withdrawal . I was sort of planning on 5' - 10' of cable per shelf which works out at about 20 - 40 watt per shelf. It's kind of tricky because while the rena version has twice the length it only has the same wattage.

I'm curious why it would take 2 UTH's per shelf -I'm sure we used to sell 3 ft UTh's in the old shop I used to work in so they should be available. In fact we had 4 foot ones I'm sure.

But there is another potential problem with that - if your planning on heating the tubs their full length but only half their width ( guessing on the 15/3 giving the 5 tanks thing) then it won't really give them much of a thermal gradient will it?

I was planning on the tubs sitting so that the long side faced me and was drawn out that way with the heating taking up about one foot of the shelf on either the right or left hand sides with a possible supplemental UTH or loop of heat cable on a seperate thermostat on the opposite side to control the cool side temps.

And on the hatchling shelves I was going to have it running along the back of the enclosure (probably about 4" deep) with the hatchling tubs facing short side out. Mind you this again means a seperate thermostat but does mean it can be turned off when there are no hatchlings to save a few bob.

And yeah the tubs are turning into a right bugger to find - when you get yours could you possible let me know the outside and inside dimensions? - they don't seem to want to tell you the height on the ikea site .

Are you thinking of getting the combined hydro/temp sensors? - cheapest I could find those was £15 but was planning on taking a wander round a garden center next weekend to see if there were any cheaper alternatives.

Do you know of any good links for how to wire up the flexwatt? I'm assuming it would need to be in parallel so one could fail without them all failing and then have some sort of block that connected them all into one cable for the thermostat to connect to.


dr del