New owner and another heating question.

I have gotten a leopard gecko yesterday, I dont know if it is male or female and I dont know how old it is but it is about 3".

I have her in a 20 gallon long aquarium with tile for substrait.

I am using an uth that is 8x10 from zoo med. But I dont know how many watts it is.

I am monitoring my hot side floor with a hydrofarm thermostat.

I have one hide on the hot side with the probe in it. A tupperware with paper towels in it for her moist hide that is half on the cool side and half on the hot side. And two hides on the cool side + food bowl, water bowl, and calcium bowl.

Ok now for my problem: I set up the cage before i got her but didnt have the hides yet. At first the probe would be reading 93 but I like to double check with my heat gun and it said 100! I did a few test through out the day and the tiles did feel to hot to the touch so I went by the temp my gun said and adjusted the thermostat.

Well now I have her in her tank with all the hides and I have a problem: The thermostat says 94 but the temp gun says 87 and the tile feels cool to the touch.

What should I do? I still think the temp gun is right but has made the temp fall so much? I dont want my poor little baby to freeze!

I just took the hot hid out and read the floor inside and it is 101, I know that is to high so I am droping the temp. I it ok for only the hot hide to be hot because the rest of the hot side is pretty cool.

Your body runs at approximately 97.6F, so you actually won't notice, to the touch, that much difference between your hand and the tile.

Also remember that the temps in the hide are also trapping ambient heat not just floor temps so by getting a higher reading may be a bit inaccurate using the heat gun for the reading because it's going thru the hot air before getting to the actual floor temp. As much as people love temp guns I think a probe really does give you a good temp reading. A probe is actually measuring the actual floor temps and not being affected by the ambient air trapped in the hot hide.

For such a young leo, they prefer warmer temps anyway so keeping a floor temp of 94-96*F is best imo. They also prefer multipul hides in such a big tank, they don't like feeling exposed so you might want to add another hide or 2 to the warm side so that it can thermoregulate to a cooler hide if it's too hot in the main hot hide. I wouldn't be too worried overall about getting higher than acceptable readings IF you provide multipul hides for him to thermoregulate to to find the temps that suit him best.

Well that makes sense since different places on the hot side are reading different temps do to I believe the placement of the coils in the heat mat. I have my probe on the hotted place.

The only thing that makes me question the probe is #1 it was made to be put into the dirt to read ground temps and #2 it is cylindrical so there is only a very small surface area is touching the tile. It is made to read 360* so I am thinking it is reading the air temp too maybe.

It does read the air temp to a certain degree but everything beyond the collar near the end of the probe is all the sensing element, not just the very end so it does give you a pretty accurate reading, I'd have to say with in a couple degrees either way. It's minimally affected by ambient temps. You can always use multipul probes for more accuracy if it worries you too much. After all they are pretty inexpensive.

What type of uth are you using? I dislike the coil ones, inconsistant heating elements made from substandard cheap wire. This is why I prefer the cobra heat mats (either by T-Rex or ultratherm)... copper banding strips used as the heating element, and more of them, they are very consistant with output and heat evenly throughout the entire mat plus they're non-adhesive so you can move them as often as you like .