Heat pads vs. mats

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dmina

dmina

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Well winter is quickly approaching... (boo-hiss) LOL

Last year I supplementary heated my bug room with an electric heater... needless to say.. it was an outrageous increase cost to my electric bill... but it was just to late to start a different program... I never knew the heater would increase my bill that much.

This year I need to do something different... I have been looking into the heating pads (seed sprouters) or the clear heat mats..

I would like to get some input into these different devises from.. anyone who know anything about either one of these devises?

Or if anyone else uses them?

How you set them up?

Timers?

How expensive they are to your electric bill?

pro's & con's?

With my set up.. it is looking like I may need 10 different pads (10x20), to use on my shelves. Between mantis & live food.

This year, after I move... my bug room is going to be a storage room.. with no heat register in it..

So I need to set it up for heat and light set with timers...

Any and all suggestions are appreciated... a sounding board of sorts... I have been looking these things up, and I am pretty much brain dead now... This is all new to me...and at this point I am understanding nothing... and just simply confused!

Please any help would be greatly appreciated... Thank you so much for looking in... Anything? anyone? Please... Thanks

 
I buy seedling heat pads and use them to heat a large container that the mantis enclosures are placed inside of. The clear plastic ones sold for pets are overpriced at pet stores and tend not to be as durable or good at emitting heat. The black heat pads sold at pet stores are also overpriced and are essentially the same as the cheaper heat pads you buy for germinating seedlings.

You'll need a large bin that's made of plastic that's heat resistant or a large glass fish tank and a piece of styrofoam to direct the heat from the pad into the container rather than into both the container and the surface the pad is placed on. The pad can either be placed on the bottom of the container or on the side, but make sure that if it's on the bottom, you elevate the enclosures with the mantises so that they're not directly on the heat and then I stack them all inside on top of one another so that they're kept in ambient warmth rather than directly on top of the heat. This method makes it so that you can heat several enclosures with fewer heat pads without creating hot spots that might overheat any one enclosure.

 
I use a everyday human heating pad, the kind found at drug stores and such. It is a Sunbeam brand and does a auto-shutoff in one hour. I fixed that problem by plugging it into a simple timer, and I have it set to turn on for 15 minutes, then off for 15 alternating for the full 24 hours. I have that plugged into a surge protector in case the heating pad ever fries the protector will trip and turn off electricity making it safer. If I needed to run more than one pad I would simply plug a 5+ outlet strip into the timer to power them all from the same timer.

Anyway I have been using it like that under one side/half of my cricket tank for about 6 months or more now (12 hours every day). It works great and keeps the area of the cricket tank with the heating pad under it at about 85 F degrees and the other corner is upper 70's usually. The crickets enjoy it and lay more eggs, and the eggs stay in the heated area so they hatch faster.

The heating pad uses 50 watts a hour, and using a basic electricity calculator, with my timer it runs 12 hours a day - in one month it costs only $0.90 to run (depending on your electric kWh price). If you had to run 10 pads, that would be $9.00 a month (surely much better than your heater last winter).

 
I used to use the seedling heat mats and found they worked well. The only issue I ever had is that one of them got really warm and made the counter top material buckle a bit in my laundry room. After that happened, I put them on a timer so that they would go on and off 4 times during the day. Currently I'm keeping my mantids at room temperature. But the vent is closed in the summer to prevent cold air from the air conditioner. So, it's typically warmer than the rest of the house. I also plugged them into a surge protector as CosbyArt suggested.

 
I use an exo terra heat lamp. Very good temperature control and can be put on a timer for day and night usage. I can keep one spot a solid 80 degrees at all times.

 
Thanks for the input...

My shelving is wire racks... but I keep my containers in the plastic flower trays



I was looking at some of those clear thin mats at the reptile show... and it just don't seem like they would do the job..

 
They have a tendency to get too hot in one location, they can't be regulated either which is why some snake keepers advise against them. They have had their snakes burned from a heat mat. You can get mounting equipment for the lamps as well, they clamp onto a surface.

 
I also use a seedling mat with a thermostat. But reading all of the above, I have made some changes, adding insulation between the granite counter and the mat, and also putting a woven mat under my cages (they had been sitting on the heating mat and I couldn't sync the thermostat with the thermometers in the cages! Thank you for all of your ideas!

 

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