Thermostat

Thermostat: a heating mat held at one temperature

A heating mat has no control of its own. Plug it in and it warms, and it keeps warming. This thermostat goes in between. It draws power from the wall, the mat plugs into the socket on the front of the unit, and a thin probe on a cable measures the temperature wherever you choose to put it. The red display shows that reading. Press the set key, use the arrows to enter a value, and the thermostat switches the mat on and off by itself to stay near that number. The range runs from 16 to 40 degrees Celsius. A separate key selects whether the unit works in heating or in cooling mode; with a heating mat you leave it on heating.

That makes this a tool above all for people running mushroom grow kits who would rather not adjust things by hand every day. A room is colder at night than during the day, and colder again in January than in May. The Avalon heating mats bring the temperature up to around 23 degrees, but without any regulation the end result still depends on how warm or cold the space around them happens to be. With a thermostat in the chain you decide that yourself, and you can read off what is actually being measured.

Setting it up

1. Plug the thermostat into the wall and the heating mat into the socket on the front.
2. Place the probe beside your kit, where the temperature actually matters, and not squeezed between the mat and the kit.
3. Select heating mode and enter your value with the set key and the arrows.
4. Check in a few times over the first hour and move the probe if the reading does not match what you expect.

Points to watch

Never stand a grow kit directly on the mat; keep something in between, a thin book for instance, exactly as the instructions with the mats say. Let the heat escape rather than build up. Keep the unit, the plugs and the cable dry, and do not lay the probe in the layer of water at the bottom of the filter bag. Avalon Magic Plants also stocks the Avalon Heating Mat Small and Large, the Mushroom Grow Kit Heat Guard and the rest of the growing aids, among them perlite and sterile syringes.