Starters needs suggestions

[jlarner]

Yes, I've seen that video, and I guessed that you were doing something similar. I don't think the video actually says what the temperature of the output actually is.  It's helpful to know that for all that effort you can get your petroleum down to close to your crude oil temp. 

You're absolutely right that you don't want to be putting hot petroleum in a coolant loop. As I said, my goal was to give an example of how you can get an oil boiler to work early/mid game, and what some of the pitfalls of doing it are. And also to show that you can do it will almost no startup time with some designs.  I like my design because it does something useful with all the Metal Refinery heat, whereas most designs 'waste' it by just using a solution which gets rid of it.

[Gus Smedstad]

My current experience is that the heat exchanger doesn't need to be quite as long as in that video. The petroleum hits 90 C at about pipe segment 160. It takes a while to reach that state, when the flow first got to the bottom the petroleum was at 80 within the first 25 segments. As it progresses, the oil gets hotter as it's delivered, and it takes more pipe segments for the petroleum to cool.

I'm slowly transitioning to trying to use heat instead of just eliminate it. I don't know how it would be if I started over with a new colony, whether that's really practical until the late game.

The problem is that, off the top of my head, there are only 3 uses for heat: refining (or evaporating, if you go that far) oil, steam for rockets, and running steam turbines. The last is so terrible that it's really just another was of eliminating heat rather than doing anything useful.

That said, my experience with the metal refinery is usage is so erratic that you'd only really want this as a backup to some other way of making petroleum. Like the basic refinery building.

For example, I was using crude oil as a coolant for my metal refinery and then eliminating it with the oil refinery. There was nowhere near enough hot crude oil output to satisfy the oil refinery's demand for more oil, so I set it up so the refinery could use "cold" (80 C) oil if there wasn't any output from the metal refinery. Pretty soon that was the majority of the processed oil.

[lee1026]

Heat have a decent amount for uses, depending on the temperature. Low levels of temperatures is useful for peppernut farms to prevent them from dying. Medium temperatures can be used to kill germs. Steam turbine power is another obvious way to use heat, and it really isn't as weak as you might think it is - if you block ports, the steam turbine only requires about 600K or so DTUs to run, which means that a steel refinery can actually power multiple steam turbines. Unreliable power, but handy to build up a large lime supply for when the natural gas goes dormant.

 

At more extreme levels of heat, melting regolith into hatch food is handy for all sorts of reasons and nearly vital for me (downside of building my food supply around hatches is that I need more rocks than many people consider possible). melting insulation into tunsgten is a powerful tool to get more of a nonrenewable and key resource.

[Gus Smedstad]

Surprisingly, I've never had a problem with killing food poisoning germs. Without much effort I've been able to keep my toilet water away from my food supply water, and nothing else cares. I'm using a chlorine room to kill slimelung. Maybe there's a window where a "hot room" to kill slimelung before you get a supply of chlorine, I haven't tried that.

I'm still a novice at steam turbines. I've got just one running, and so far it's done almost nothing. The setup I've got is temperamental, the steam going into the turbine never stays hot for long, and the turbine spends most of its time spinning up or spinning down. It's a fine high-elimination heat elimination device that costs no resources, but it's not a meaningful source of power so far.

I do mean to adapt my regolith cooling system to powering a turbine, but that's on a back burner right now. I've got other things going on, like resolving a water crisis caused by cool steam geysers locking up from overpressure, and revamping my power grid to deal with loads over 20kw.

My hatch demand for rock doesn't seem important right now. I'm curious how you work the insulation to tungsten transformation, even if I don't need anything like that since I've been carefully conserving my tungsten.