Choosing and Using Thermostats

When it comes to keeping your pets healthy and active, getting the temperature right is one of the most important factors – and thermostats are the key to achieving it.

A quick visit to any pet shop or supplier specialising in exotic pets will reveal a wide range of different types and sizes of heaters for adding the necessary additional warmth, including heat mats, hot rocks, heat lamps and ceramic heaters. Controlling them to ensure that the tank remains at the right temperature for your pets is the job of thermostats – and there’s a fairly large selection of these to choose from too. Picking the right one depends on a number of things.

Go For Quality

Thermostats are designed to turn heating elements on to ensure the tank warms up to an appropriate temperature, off once it has and then on again as things cool down.

During the course of the average week, your thermostat will go through hundreds of on/off cycles and a failure during any one of them could have disastrous consequences – or to put it another way, it’s the only thing standing between cooking your pet or chilling it to death. If that thought doesn’t convince you to buy the very best quality thermostats that you can lay your hands on, then nothing will!

Good thermostats certainly don’t come cheap – top-of-the-range types have a price tag of £70 or more – but then quality never does and it really is a small price to pay to safeguard your pet.

Practical Considerations

The most obvious practical consideration is to make sure that the thermostat you buy is suitable for the type of heater you are going to use it with; all thermostats will have their maximum power rating written on them in watts (W). Don’t exceed it – an obvious point but one still worth making.

In addition, there are some kinds which have been designed for use with specific types of heaters, the most commonly seen being thermostats made to control heat mats or heating strips and those intended for ceramic heater units. Clearly, if there is an appropriate thermostat specially made for the sort of heating you have, it makes sense to use it.

Environmental Control

The major thermostat manufacturers have a comprehensive range to suit any kind of animal, all sorts of tank and every variety of heater, offering varying degrees of environmental control – which is really what these devices are all about.

The least complicated versions – simple on/off thermostats – for example, just switch the power off to heaters when the temperature reaches a pre-set value, and then turn it back on when the tank has cooled by two or three degrees.

More sophisticated 'dimmer-stats' gradually reduce the electricity supply once the right level of warmth has been achieved. This is particularly useful when coupled with heat lamps as it avoids the 'light-on, light-off' effect that traditional thermostats have, which some types of animals seem to find stressful and, because it’s gentler on the element, it also helps to make the bulb last longer too. Some of the latest forms of thermostats even offer the opportunity to have different temperatures for day and night automatically maintained, providing as near a natural environment for your pets as it’s probably possible to create in captivity.

Although we automatically tend to think of thermostats as part of a heating system, it’s also important to remember a final group of these devices which are designed to work not with heaters but with fans or chillers to cool things down. For anyone wanting to keep some of the newts and salamanders of northern Europe for example, keeping the temperature low enough can be a major headache – and calls for a really effective cooling system linked to a very efficient thermostat.

Any exotic pet you choose to keep depends on you to get its environment right and if that animal is going to stay healthy and active, that means replicating the sort of conditions it would find in its natural home.

Controlling day length is easy, a simple plug-in timer will do that; maintaining the right temperature, safely and accurately, is a little more complicated, but the solution is straightforward – just pick the right thermostat for the job.