The rancos have the be set to heat or cool, I think you can get dual stages that will do both, for twice the price. I assume the ink bird would be a single stage set up with a hot and cold or two hots. It might not be able to do heating and cooling at the same time, so on units with both you could only use one side. If it has two heating out puts you should be able to plug in heaters to both and calibrate them the same. I can't imagine you would be able to draw more power out of it, these units weren't designed to run heating and cooling at once so I doubt the outputs are designed to take on more wattage than originally intended.
These electronic heat controllers were designed for general purpose use. This includes deep freezer chests, boiling brewing setups and everywhere in between. Having two outputs on a single stage keeps them from having to pander to one specific crowd, and in turn make a bulk of units available for all purposes. For dual stage you could setup ac and a space heater in your room set to 75 with a temp differential of 5. At 80 the AC kicks on bring it down to 75. Year round temp control, that you set once and forget.
I'm just trying to give you an idea of how they can work, I'd imagine some hobbies make more use of it than others. For me these things have a long history of reliability across hundreds of different intentions. I can't help but look at the ink bird as an aquarium pandering little brother, even though I know it's not the case. Whenever I get around to setting up a breeder or two I'll pick up that inkbird without the cooling output.
Do they offer dual stage inkbird?
