Hobby Biotherm Eco Terrarium Thermostat

Hobby Biotherm Eco Terrarium Thermostat is a microprocessor-controlled terrarium thermostat, and it is the single most important thing you can put between a heat lamp and an animal. A heater without a thermostat is not a heating system, it is a hope.

Key Features

• Night-Time Temperature Drop: automatically lowers the target overnight. Most reptiles need a night-time cool period and do badly without one, so this is a husbandry feature rather than an energy-saving one.
• Visual Alarm: warns you when the temperature leaves the set range - which is how you find out a bulb has failed before your animal does.
• Invert Function: switches between heating and cooling control, so the same unit can run a heat source in winter or a fan in a UAE summer.
• Microprocessor Control for a tighter band than a mechanical stat.
• Built For Terraria, not for a room. It is designed around the temperatures and the day-night cycle a reptile or amphibian needs.

Why A Thermostat Is Not Optional

• An unregulated heat source has no upper limit. It keeps putting heat in until something stops it, and in a UAE summer the ambient temperature is already high. Overheating kills reptiles faster than cold does.
• Put the probe where the animal is, not next to the lamp and not in the cool end. The probe position is the setting that matters most, and it is the one most people get wrong.
• Protect the probe cable. Anything that chews will chew a probe lead, and a severed probe usually means the heater runs flat out.
• Keep a separate thermometer. Trust but verify - a second, independent reading at the basking surface is how you catch a probe that has drifted or moved.
• Still leave a gradient. A thermostat holds one point; your animal needs a warm end and a cool end so it can choose.

Good To Know

• This listing is the controller only. Heat source, lamp and fitting are separate.
• UAE mains suits this. Hobby build to 230V 50Hz, which is what comes out of the wall here, so there is no voltage problem. The plug is the European two-pin type, so you will want an adapter or a UK plug fitted - and it is worth running tank and terrarium equipment through an RCD-protected socket.
• Check the total wattage you are switching against the unit's rating before you connect anything.
• Mount it outside the enclosure, somewhere dry, where you can read it without opening the terrarium.
• Set it, then watch it for a day with an independent thermometer before you trust it with an animal.