What do you use for housing your reptiles & why?

Oh how I wish this was true. I can't wire those, hubby can't, urgh!

Sure you can!
It adds $1.20 or so to the total for a heater, but if you can't solder you can use the metal connectors made for the purpose.
I have a Flexwatt wiring page that describes how to do it. It's very simple, and only takes a few minutes.

Clay,
I have looked for flexwatt on the internet and from what I can see you have to buy in bulk. I don't need that much flexwatt that it would ever pay for me to buy a hundred feet of it. If you know where I can get it for 4.50 a foot without having to buy in bulk I would be interested. Where can you get a thermometer gun?
thanks
mark

The Bean Farm among other places sells Flexwatt by the foot. Eleven inch wide runs $3.75 I do believe.
The Bean Farm
The $4.50 price I mentioned included the power cord which you must supply. They run 0.79 or so at Wal-Mart.

As for temp guns, my personal preference are the raytec models with the laser. These are somewhat more expensive than some models, but I like them.
I know I bought mine for I think $100 a few years ago, but I'm pretty sure I've seen them as low as 60 lately. Either way they've come way down over the last 5+ years.
There is a new mini temp gun available now for $25. Reptile Basics and Pro Exotics both sell those I believe. I haven't used one myself, but I have talked to Richard at Reptile Basics about them and he said they were a fine instrument for the money.
Temp gun from Reptile Basics - $29.50 shipping included.
I'll keep an eye out for a dealer of the Raytecs like I use, but I can't think of anyone off the top of my head that sells them, since I haven't been looking for any.

For those of you using custom made rack systems, what do you generally use as a thermostat?

I have built my own rack, which has five shelves on it. I have my heat tape all set up on each shelf, wired and everything. Now I just need to find a thermostat for the tape.

I was looking into the various ones, and most seem to only have 1 plug, so it would only be able to control one strip of flex watt. The best I found was a thermostat with three plug in's. They where 35$ each. Either way, the thermostat part becomes pretty costly.

Is it possible to hook up one of those power cord strips (those things that have 6 plug ins) into the plug in of the thermostat, and then plug the strips into that? Or does that not work correctly then?

When I set up a rack I wire all the shelves together so that there is only one plug to power the entire rack.
If the rack is larger of course I may wire it where there's two circuits total or what have you, but either way, I don't wire each shelf with it's own plug.

You can use a power strip, but the problem you run into is the strips are grounded and most of the cheaper thermostats you will see won't accept a three prong plug. You don't want to get into using a bunch of splitters or extention cords either.

I use ZooMed Repti-Temp 500R thermostats on some racks, while on others I may use a Helix. I also have a Big Apple proportional thermostat in use. Alot of people brag on the Ranco models as well, but I haven't used these myself.
If you consider $35 to be costly for a thermostat, then you are in trouble. Try looking at it this way, if the cheap thermostat fails and kills your animals, or worse yet sets the house on fire, was the small savings on the initial setup worth it?

35$ is no problem, or costly, but having to buy 5 of them (1 for each shelf) is 175$. Which is pretty costly to heat 1 shelf. In that case I might just as well buy a helix, which I planned to do anyway, just not yet. Actually, add in the cost of the shelf supplies and I could have simply bought an animal plastics for the same price with no time spent building it.

I used the strips only because I had them though already. I do have more longer ones, so maybe I will simply run 2 strips, instead of 1 on each shelf.

No big deal either way, I was just trying to figure out a way to use all five plug ins.

Has anybody used a helix? Are they easy to wire into?

What I'm saying is use the five individual heaters, one per shelf, but wire the heaters together so that one plug powers them all.
Then you take the one plug and plug it into the thermostat whibh can now control all the heaters.
THis picture shows sort of what I mean http://www.arbreptiles.com/cages/rack13.jpg

ahhh, I was originally thinking that, but did not think I could do it. Obviously I am not much of a wiring knowledgable person! lol. That will work out perfect for me then. Thanks a lot!!

I answered wooden cages. I am purely a "pet owner" and wooden cages fit into my decorating scheme much better than anything else. I looked at the other options, but did not like them aesthetically, so I started looking into what it would take to make the wooden cages last a long time and be energy efficient and then designed my own cages and had my husband build them for me.

I do own one glass tank, currently empty, which was the "starter tank" for my JCP. It has been empty since the JCP was moved to the adult-sized wooden enclosure, but I still keep it in case it comes in handy as a starter tank for another animal...

- Jackie Gerth

While on the topic about heat tape for the moment. Does anybody know where I can get those little alligator clip things that you get with the heat tape? I need about 10 of them. No department / electric store in my area carries them.