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A solution to water cooling (for plants/base)


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Hello all,

With the new patch, and awful lot of questions have been floating around on the forums, and the most recurring seem to be related to water cooling or how to maintain excellent crops.

Here is the solution I came up with on stream to deal with some of your cooling woes :)

The tank
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The top chamber has 3 pumps, all of which have their own power line, with 2 thermo switches on each (placed one before, and one after each pump). The switches are set to specific temperature ranges to only pump when both criteria are met, i.e. Above 18 degrees, but below 21 - and only if both criteria are met does the pump work. The thermo switches are placed on top of insulated gas pipe so that the radiator of cooled hydrogen behind them (that cools the water) doesn't affect them too much.

The Wires
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The three pumps below in the separate chambers are all on manual switches, so I can flip them and pump them out as/when I need them (although they're not currently plumbed in as i've not got around to that yet on stream (the pipes are there but they have no destinations!) :D

The Temperature
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The water itself is 50-60 degree geyser water, being pumped in through a single vent on the top right - a valve can be seen on the left, I use that to manually adjust the flow if needed (although it's currently on full flow rate).

The Three Rooms:

20 Degrees for mealwoods (on the right)
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16 Degrees for the base in general (middle) - I like to always have cooled water handy!
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2 Degrees for those pesky blossoms! (left)
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In short, with the agricultural upgrade it became apparent that the future was all about water cooling, so i figured i'd hash together a more practical use for the standard "cooling tank" - I'm biased but i'm quite proud of it :) 

Anyway - I hope it helps, and if you have any questions feel free to give me a shout.

Much love,

-Life.

**EDIT** - Just so we're all clear, this water is not for "feeding" to plants, it's intended to be a precise way of keeping the room cold :p  A few of you seem to think I wanted to gently feed this lovely cooled water to my plants with a pipette... No! Dey eats geyser water! :D 

 

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Does the temperature of water routed to irrigated tiles matter? It seems to me that if you use abyssalite pipes, it does not at the moment. The farming tile does not seem to be affected by temperature of water stored in it, and plants seem to generate their own temperature, also independent on the water.

Here's a shreenshot of my non-irrigated Bristle Blossom farm. No water is routed to it, it has stable ideal temperature all through everything but the plants, and all plants are around 17 C, warming the whole farm up.

s0Yyuim.jpg

And here's a screenshot of my Pincha Pepper farm, again everything but plants is at near ideal temperature, there's polluted water at 12 C routed to the tiles but the tiles are not affected, and plants are cooling the farm, apparently also starting at nead 20 C but gradually warming up as they grow:

GJ65xOZ.jpg

To me it means the temperature of water in the farming tile is irrelevant.

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Can't say I experimented on it scientifically, but temperature of water irrigation should not matter to the plant. The way it could affect it is if the pipe itself warmed up the surrounding air.

Mind you, cooling the water for general base use is good idea anyway, but not exactly necessary for farming. The hard part is effective and precise cooling of the air around plant.

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Neat setup! What is causing the temperature differential across the top chamber? Why is the right side hot, while the left side is cold? It looks like your hydrogen pipes span the entire length of the chamber. I understand that hot geyser water comes in the top right, but how to you keep that heat on the right? What stops the temperature from normalizing across?

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9 hours ago, Kasuha said:

Does the temperature of water routed to irrigated tiles matter? It seems to me that if you use abyssalite pipes, it does not at the moment. The farming tile does not seem to be affected by temperature of water stored in it, and plants seem to generate their own temperature, also independent on the water.

To me it means the temperature of water in the farming tile is irrelevant.

You've missed the point Kas, the water isn't to feed the plants - the water is to cool the room :D 

4 hours ago, CantBreathe said:

Last I checked the temp reset in pipes bug was back. Does this system use cooled hydrogen affected by the bug?

It uses cooled hydrogen in the pipes on a closed loop - however it'd work the exact same with any gas that stays continuously cooler than 1 degree, meaning if it wasn't a closed loop, you could throw in a thermo regulator on a t-junction (like I showed you in your thread the other day) to maintain any temp change.

3 hours ago, Vilda said:

Can't say I experimented on it scientifically, but temperature of water irrigation should not matter to the plant. The way it could affect it is if the pipe itself warmed up the surrounding air.

Mind you, cooling the water for general base use is good idea anyway, but not exactly necessary for farming. The hard part is effective and precise cooling of the air around plant.

Again, you've missed the intended purpose buddy - the water is not for feeding the plants - scorching hot geyser water is fine for that - the water is for cooling the room in a snazzy way :D 

1 hour ago, SniderThanYou said:

Neat setup! What is causing the temperature differential across the top chamber? Why is the right side hot, while the left side is cold? It looks like your hydrogen pipes span the entire length of the chamber. I understand that hot geyser water comes in the top right, but how to you keep that heat on the right? What stops the temperature from normalizing across?

The right side is where the hot water comes in through the vent as mentioned, this leads to a "striping" effect from right to left naturally - that's why this works - realistically I should probably dump the water off elsewhere once all 3 tanks are full to allow it to "reset" - but I don't need that much water honestly (it's only to put in a few radiators for blossoms more than anything).

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