Thermostat failures

Just a thought, how much reliance can be put in thermostats? I know from when I had my tropical fish and was using fishy forums I'd read several times about failure in the 'on' position leading to tanks overheating and collections being lost.
The general run of advice was to never fully trust the thermostats, and comparisons of various brands and price ranges showed that any thermostat has the potential to fail.

People should never put ALL of their trust on anything electronic! It is a useful tool to help you so you dont have to be checking temps 10 times a day but I wouldn't rely on it completely...check on it occassionally just to make sure everythings running ok. Nothing is perfect IMO..

Anything electrical or mechanical will break down eventually. The cynical side of me thinks most consumer goods are built to last only a limited amount of time, to make sure we go out and buy more to keep the manufacturers and economy ticking over.

I check viv temps manually with an infra-red thermometer, as part of the feed/spot-clean/water change routine.

I've been using stats for some years (not as long as I ought, I confess) and I've only had one go wrong - it was part of an incubator setup and resulted in a batch of boiled eggs. I manually check incubators weekly now, but doubt it provides much mitigation - even a short spike at the upper temp ranges seems to carry a risk of kinking/embryo death.

But still, one stat failure in years is fine by me. It's bound to happen sometime.

I feel slightly safer with the Herpstat ND which has high and low temp alarms. I'm using those on all but two set ups. All set ups have probed digital thermometers hung where I can read them any time I walk by.

I'm a temperature control freak. I use habistat pulse proportional stats and have a digital thermometer in almost every one of my boxes. I get temperature spikes in the winter on REALLY cold nights when the ambient temperature drops suddenly and the stats continue to heat up, but I have a max/min button on each of the thermometers so I can always check them.

I have used other thermostat brands in the past as well as other models by habistat and they were utterly unreliable.