I thought about going the wifi thermostat route but decided to go a different route. Instead I am running sensors from Sensor Push. It is a very small unit that runs off a battery that lasts a year or two and tracks temperature and humidity in a basic but useful app for your phone. You can set temperature (and/or humidity) limits so if it goes out of range you will get a notification on your phone. The base setup runs off of bluetooth, which defeats the purpose to some degree because it will only work while you are within range (in your house) and only while you have bluetooth turned on. They sell a wifi router for it that will connect it to the internet which will give it the ability to constantly monitor and send you a notification if it goes out of range wherever you are (as long as you’re connected to internet).
I like the idea of running a system entirely independent from the thermostat system as a failsafe way to keep an eye on things. It can also be useful to track things long term. Say you have a really good breeding season and want to look back months back to see how temperatures were, etc. All that information is saved in the cloud for free.
In an ideal scenario I’d have both a wifi t-stat and separate monitoring system. If the t-stat were to fail and think it’s cooler and start overheating things the monitoring system would catch it. This could happen with a probe failure or if the probe somehow gets pulled off the heat tape, for example. You could then remotely kill the power to the thermostat and save your snakes without ever having to set foot in the snake room.
I really like and reccomend the sensor push system. Morph mixology did a good video on it if you’d like to check it out more in depth:
And here’s a link to the wifi unit so it can work outside of the house without bluetooth.