I seem to be having heating issues with my Tarantula's, thought perhaps people could help me out.

I've been reading alot of articles where people suggest so many different heating methods. Currently I haven't had any deaths with my current heating setup until my slings pass the a day ago.

These are the methods I've seen:

1. Heating pad underneath the tank, heating only half the tank. Arboreal and Terrestrial. I'm currently using this method.

2. Heating the side of the tank with a heating pad for terrestrial and heating under the tank for Arboreal.

3. Putting the heating mat inside the top of the tank.

I can only afford heating mats at this point so I'm stuck with this dilemma. Any ideas?

There are many ways to skin a cat!
I personally believe in heating the tanks from the side of the tank and from the outside, Silver side facing inwards.

The idea is that when the pad is on the side it allows for the T to have both a warm and a cooler side. This is especially good for fossorial species that will find cooler spots by burrowing.

Another idea is to use a timer with your heat pads; attach all of your heat pads to a single plug and plug them in through a timer.

My method is to time how long it takes for the tank to reach the appropriate temperature and then kill the power and time how long it takes for the tank to cool down to around 15 degrees. You will need a thermometer for this.

Once you have the times, set the timer accordingly
eg. 20minutes on, 15 minutes off.

I like to approximately half the ON time and also approximately double the OFF time for a cooler night time.

I could be very wrong, but my methods have kept my T's happy so far.
The way i see it is that the T's also need to have a summer and a winter time. except for the equatorial species which naturally wouldn't be subjected to drastic climate changes.

I hope that helped.
Good luck!

Some good ideas there thanks man.

At the moment they on permanently because my living room is coldish during the day and rather freezing at night.

I do have a timer but its disconnected at the moment.

Would this work fine as well?

Heating pad under the tank, heating half the tank (currently setup like this) with a timer to heat the tank with 30 minute intervals. 40 minutes on, 30 minutes off. I am getting some thermos so to measure the temps in the tanks but the budget is taking a little hit at the moment

Alot of people say heating half the tank from underneath is a good way to keep them because the T will just move around if too hot and find a cooler or at least the right area with the temp.

Putting your tanks ontop of the heating pad is actaully wasting heat,but it is also not good for your spiders??.
Reason, there is half of the pad that is not getting used, if you put your tanks against the heating pad and heating pad against a piece of wood against the wall you can use one heating pad to heat 4 tanks.

That way you don't need 5 heating pads for every tank.

No i have large heating pads and I put two tanks next to one another and they both get heated from one pad, half the tank or rather 40-45% of the tank does. My tanks are also glass but i'm moving them all to perspex so the heat factor should increase a little bit.

Just a quick question. My tanks are all going to be Perspex soon with the air vents on the front for my terrestrial species and air vents on the sides and front for my Aboreal ones.

Now instead of heating from the bottom with heat pads, could i possibly put the heating pads on the top (outside) the tank, half the tank though and just put it on a timer? Would that work better than heating them from the bottom?