To Hot to Handle?

If the amplifier is not class A, the heat of the tubes will be minimal. You might be suprised how much heat a transistor amp can make too- sometimes not really a lot less then a tube amp. A lot is depending on how you play the system and the class of operation.

My guess is heat is not a factor here. It gets hotter here in the Midwest then in the Northeast. I have the smallest air conditioner I could find ($75 special from Best Buy- it was either that or rewire the house for something bigger and I am too lazy for that) in my listening room and it keeps up with 28 power tubes (it can be switched from class A to class AB). My guess is you have no worries.

Actually, the filaments do not make most of the heat, which is a common misconception. The tube conducting makes most of the heat- by that I mean the tube conducting as a matter of its class of operation (class A or AB for example), and conducting due to the signal it is amplifying.

If you disconnect the B+ from the tube so that it is merely lit up but not conducting, you will find that most of the heat is gone.

One exception to this is the 6C33-BC power tube, which has a prodigious filament circuit (which overloads the socket that the tube uses and leads to the failure of the socket; the extreme heat that the socket otherwise sees in service contributes to a large degree to that too, so the smaller pins usually fail first).

So other then the 6C33, the filament is about 15-25% of the heat of the tube. The more class AB the circuit is, the larger the proportion of the heat is filament (since class AB circuits run cooler).