Effective way of melting ice

[Wormerine]

Any ideas on how effectively melt ice? I know Klei added geysers, but I didn't find one yet on this playthrough. I want to melt ice to generate more water (in addition to purifing polluted water from slimey biom, but so far my to heaters are doing poor job (image attatched.) Sure enough, the air is wormed up to 40-50C but it doesn't seem to do much to ice somehow. I also had a block of ice mined and moved into my base, but it didn't melt either, even though it is kept in 25+C enviroment.

[Wormerine]

just realized there isn't to much air up there... it might be the reason why heat doesn't transfer too well.

[Kasuha]

My approach: build a storage container submerged in warm water, fill it with ice, and wait. It may take a long time, the more full the container is the longer, but it will melt eventually. And be ready to get a lot of water when that happens - a full container can release as much as 20 tiles of water.

[Jumpp]

I used to have the same problem: Couldn't figure out how to get ice to melt. A 20,000kg hunk of ice is going to be able to absorb a tremendous amount of heat before it melts. Warming it with air, like you're trying to do, can't work on any kind of reasonable time scale. Air isn't very dense, and is a poor conductor of heat anyway. Your 20,000kg lump of ice is in contact with, what, 1-2 kg of air?

Submerging it in water would work better. Now your ice is in contact with 1,000kg of warm water instead of 1-2kg of warm air. But you'll need a tepidizer or a geyser to keep the water hot, and even then it'll take a long time. Also note that a tepidizer draws a tremendous amount of electricity.

I never found a solution that'd work for you. My "solution" was to stop wanting ice to melt. It worked for me, but that may not suit your use case.

[Wormerine]

Thanks a lot! I will try the trick with the container as I already have a body of water with tepidizer set up. 

 

[n37runn3r]

I actually melted an entire ice biome by accident, but it turned out to be super useful. I was digging a CO2 dump into the ice under my base and there was a nearby geyser that I was using for water. When my dam broke, it flooded the ice biome and the whole thing started to melt, giving me a giant lake of polluted water. I keep moving the pump further down into the lake when I run out at that level. I have worts all along the path of the water so it doesn't instantly kill my pumps/wires by overheating.

Update: Also tried pouring water (you know how it makes a gooey waterfall) from a geyser through an ice biome, it was pretty effective. Also dripping water slowly lets it shed a little heat. A water-stair with worts along the stairs helped too.