Cooling down water to use

[SteveYoung]

I recently started playing the game and I encountered my first cool steam vent.  The water comes out at about 66 degrees celcius and  I'm able to cool it down to about 30 degrees by using long piping but I want it to be around 20-25 to use in my plant farms.  I've seen guides that suggest using ice biomes or wheezeworts but they're all for making your water really cold.  Are there any other ways of cooling down the water to the temperature I need for my plants?

[chemie]

Aquatuner

[metallichydra]

you can use wheezeworts

best way to do, is to fill a chamber with hydrogen, place wheezeworts, then use rasdiant pipes.

sorry, i haev no picture.

[Nightinggale]

2 hours ago, SteveYoung said:

 I've seen guides that suggest using ice biomes or wheezeworts but they're all for making your water really cold.

You need to either match the cooling power with the need (difficult), or make a way to turn the cooling off once the water is cold enough. A simple approach is to place wheezeworts on a door. If the door is open, they will have lost their floor, which makes them stop cooling.

How to turn cooling on and off to hit a specific temperature is a rather large topic, but simply put, you want automation. Doors can be opened/closed based on a temperature sensor. A pipe temperature sensor combined with a liquid pipe shutoff valve can be used to sort water based on temperature.

How to precisely do this is part of the game to discover and there is not just one way to do it. In fact looking around the forum there are frequently somebody who discovers a new way to use automation to do an already known tasks in a new way.

The simplest setup is likely to cool too little intentionally and then use automation to take water, which is too hot back to the input. The system is then self regulating to match different input temperatures because it will decide itself how many times the water goes through the cooling loop. It doesn't have a high throughput through because the same water have to go through the same pipe multiple times, but it's in the simple end of the automation difficulty and it doens't require lots of refined metals.

[fredhp]

Another option is to not cool the consumption water - it is too wasteful because a lot of power will be used to cool something that will be consumed. Instead of cooling the water, you can cool the entire base with cool polluted water in a closed loop made of normal pipes (granite is the best material for that)  that run across the base. This is very efficient - in fact if you are not carefull the base can freeze!

There are a lot of ways to get cool polluted water - you can get it from a cool slush geyser and use automation to get rid of hot water in the cooling loop - replacing with new cool water, or you can use aquaturner to cool the water and destroy the resultant heat with the steam turbine.

 

A hint: Design you base thinking about the gas flow (you want to have only O2 in the living area)  and cooling system - the base should be kept cool or bad things will happen.

[Nightinggale]

8 minutes ago, fredhp said:

Another option is to not cool the consumption water - it is too wasteful because a lot of power will be used to cool something that will be consumed. Instead of cooling the water, you can cool the entire base with cool polluted water in a closed loop made of normal pipes (granite is the best material for that)  that run across the base. This is very efficient - in fact if you are not carefull the base can freeze!

He mentioned the wheezeworts cools the water too much, meaning cooling power isn't the issue here. Other than that you are right.

Here I will again point to automation, temperature sensors and liquid pipe temperature sensors to control liquid shutoff valves. Instead of the clean water, you want to control the temperature of polluted water for accurate temperature control. Alternatively control the flow of polluted water based on gas temperature.

As I already mentioned, ONI is one of those games where there is no "the solution" to a problem. Now we have two solutions, which doesn't even fix the same problem, yet they both meets the end goal, which is temperature control of the plants.

[Neotuck]

Personally I would use cool steam water for electrolyzers.  You won't need to cool it as the oxygen/hydrogen produced is at a set temperature.  Then focus on mushroom farming.

I only do bristle berry farming if I find a slush or PW geyser. In combo with a water sieve it's much easier to cool the water from those for farming than steam.

[Sasza22]

Wheezeworts take a long time to cool water. You`d need a lot of them to get the water too cold, like 30+ or something. Anyway try puting your worts in a hydrogen filled room and loop your water through it and back to the water pool. Set a temperature sensor in the pool and automate it so it stops running through the room if it gets too cold.

For ice biomes the amount of cooling depends on the lenght of the pipe. Just make a short one and make it longer when needed. Best put it on the bottom of the biome so the melting ice keeps cooling the pipes.

Alternatively put an aquatuner in some waste water. The aquatuner drops the temperature of pasing liquid by 14^oC. It`s great for precise cooling. But keep in mind it spreads the heat around itself so if it`s not suberged in another liquid it will overheat instantly. It also uses a ton of power.

[Nightinggale]

34 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

Wheezeworts take a long time to cool water. You`d need a lot of them to get the water too cold, like 30+ or something.

In a perfectly insulated and stable setup, one wheezewort cools the water 2.87 C when the water flow is 1 kg/s. One Bristle Blossom consumes 1/30 kg/s (20 kg/cycle). When cooling the water from 66 C to 25 C, one wheezewort can cool enough water for 2.1 Bristle Blossoms.

While calculating this, I also made another setup (in pure math, none of this is tested ingame). If your toilet water is cleaned with a water sieve and then cooled to 20 C, one wheezewort can handle 6.78 flushes/cycle.

Wheezewort cooling of water is in fact possible. It's not great, but it's possible. The toilet water cooling seems reasonable as 2 wheezeworts can handle up to 13 dupes, but cooling for Bristle Blossoms require 1.43 wheezeworts for each dupe. With not perfect insulation, 3 wheezeworts can feed 2 dupes. That will quickly add up.

[bobucles]

The simple solution is you don't cool the water at all. Fighting hot water with early game tech is a losing battle. Instead pump the hot water into places that don't care about hot water. There's certainly more than enough options to go around:

- Electrolyzers output gas at the same temperature (70C) regardless of water input. Make all the involved machines out of gold amalgam at the least.

- Dupes don't care about the temperature of their bathrooms or showers. As a bonus, the polluted water output will boil all the germs. It can then be filtered in the water sieve to give automatic 40C output.

- Oil Reservoirs don't care about input temperature.

- Cooking recipes don't care how hot the water is.

- Research doesn't care.

You should have no problem using the hot water as is. Use the opportunity to ration your existing cool water and make it last much longer.

[Gurgel]

11 hours ago, bobucles said:

- Electrolyzers output gas at the same temperature (70C) regardless of water input. Make all the involved machines out of gold amalgam at the least.

Unless you want to kill your dupes, you still need to cool that output though. For mid-game, I usually place 4WWs next to each Electrolyzer for that. Later I do a central cooling aggregate (WWs in H2, temperature regulation, Water-loop to cool the base) that cools these as well.

[bobucles]

6 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Unless you want to kill your dupes, you still need to cool that output though.

That's an electrolyzer problem, not a hot water problem. Electrolyzer heat needs to be addressed no matter how hot or cold the input water is. That makes it an ideal hot water sink.

[Iwhen]

If you got power to spare you could use an steam turbine heat deletion device with diamond window titles (or metal if you haven't got diamond) connecting to your main water tank.

[Gurgel]

9 hours ago, bobucles said:

That's an electrolyzer problem, not a hot water problem. Electrolyzer heat needs to be addressed no matter how hot or cold the input water is. That makes it an ideal hot water sink.

That is exactly what does make them a bad solution. Sure, if you run them anyways, you can get a secondary use as hot water sink, but they cannot be used as such as their primary purpose.

[bobucles]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

That is exactly what does make them a bad solution. Sure, if you run them anyways, you can get a secondary use as hot water sink, but they cannot be used as such as their primary purpose.

How so? They make oxygen if the water is cold, they make oxygen if the water is hot, and it's the same oxygen either way. The hot water problem gets solved. Pre-cooling the water is a wasted effort, especially in the early stages when cold is a limited resource. That leaves the existing cold water handy for any place where temperature is critical.

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, bobucles said:

How so? They make oxygen if the water is cold, they make oxygen if the water is hot, and it's the same oxygen either way. The hot water problem gets solved. Pre-cooling the water is a wasted effort, especially in the early stages when cold is a limited resource. That leaves the existing cold water handy for any place where temperature is critical.

Oxydizers solve a different problem. They do not scale with the amount of hot water you need to get rid of, because that is just a secondary use. As I said, feeding the ones you use for oxygen generation with hot water is a good idea, but once you have done that and you still have too much hot water, they are entirely useless.

[Craigjw]

You can never have too much water.  All my spare water goes into electrolyzers, I initially had 8, but that went wrong, so had to build an emergency O2 source till I could fix that, now that it's fixed, I have 11 electrolyzers.  Only about 5 are functional at one time though.

[bobucles]

They do not scale with the amount of hot water you need to get rid of, Yeah, I don't understand this. Water is a valuable resource, so the concept of "getting rid" of water is not something that should be encouraged in any way. If there's too much hot water then a colony can let the geyser back up and stall, but that also should not be encouraged. Harnessing all the extra water a colony can get is generally the best answer for most of a colony's life.
The main issue here is the OP sees the heat as an obstacle to using hot water. The trick is to discover that the heat really isn't an obstacle, there are a LOT of places it can be safely used. So the best way for an early game, low tech colony to cool down 60C+ water is to USE it, because now the limited supply of 20C water can be saved for where it really matters. It might even last long enough to set up a permanent industrial solution, using aquatuners and steam turbines and gas engines and all that good stuff.

[Elidrin]

An Aquatuner in polluted water (that is later purified to destroy heat) is the fast, energy expensive route.

The more complicated route is the one I use which is a verticle shaft into a cold biome. You pipe hot water down, and cold water comes back up for use, the control here is a series of thermal sensors attached to pipe switches that detects when the water drops to the required temp in my case 25C. That water is then shunted to the return pipe. At the top of the return pipe is a last check to make sure the water is below 25 if not it is shunted back to the decending pipe for recooling. This will cause the biome to slowly heat up and melt the ice. The cold water flooding the lower part of the system makes it cool even better.

Later to prevent this 'defrosting' I run in radiator filled with cold hydrogen to cool the system.

[Xuhybrid]

I use an aquatuner cooling loop. It's extremely effective, however you'll need a strong power economy to make use of it.

[KittenIsAGeek]

My current map has 4 water geysers that emit around 10kg/s when erupting and have an average output of over 2kg/s each after counting their dormant period.  The water comes out at  around 90c for each.  In addition, I have 2 cool steam vents and a steam vent.  That is a LOT of heat coming into my base.  So, @SteveYoung, I sympathize with your problem. 

In my case, wheezewarts will not do enough cooling, nor will an AETN.  I simply have too much hot water to deal with.  The solution I'm working towards involves the following for water that I need to cool for use within my base (washrooms, bristleblooms, etc):

1. Use aquatuners to move heat from the water into crude oil until it boils into petrol.
2. Use pool of hot petrol to power steam turbines. 

Its still a work in progress, but my end goal will be to produce all my power from petrol and steam.  The turbines turn a LOT of heat into power, so I may end up having to cool the water that goes into the oil wells just to get enough heat to keep the turbines operating.  I'm also debating reworking my pool of petrol to use a reservoir and radiant piping to move the heat into the steam room. 

Anyway, I hope my ideas help.  When I get my design to where I want it, I may post it on the board.  My biggest problem at the moment is that I haven't been to space yet, so no niobium or thermium to work with.

[Nightinggale]

17 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

My biggest problem at the moment is that I haven't been to space yet, so no niobium or thermium to work with.

No space also means no super coolant. This means half the cooling per watt spent in your aquatuners.

[fiziologus]

On 14.06.2019 at 4:06 PM, SteveYoung said:

I recently started playing the game and I encountered my first cool steam vent.  The water comes out at about 66 degrees celcius and  I'm able to cool it down to about 30 degrees by using long piping but I want it to be around 20-25 to use in my plant farms.  I've seen guides that suggest using ice biomes or wheezeworts but they're all for making your water really cold.  Are there any other ways of cooling down the water to the temperature I need for my plants?

Create pool with hot water. Create ice via ice maker (use hot water itself) and store (or just drope) this ice just in pool. Just try.

It is long way but allow create cold water storage for cooling (run radiant pipe with hot liquide through) and using.

[KittenIsAGeek]

7 hours ago, Nightinggale said:

No space also means no super coolant. This means half the cooling per watt spent in your aquatuners.

Yep.  The best liquid I can use in my aquatuners right now is polluted water.

[Sheo]

In my base I use hot water from steam vent to heat up my pepper, then send it to O2 production and bathroom, cause there temp doesnt matter, hot pH2O from bath goes to sieve, gets down to 40C. From there back to steam vent to heat up and cool steam as well. In generel H2O stays at 60C. I send this water aswell to a small wheezewort cooling chamber (4xWW) to get it down to 0C for my farm. I could use the sieved water for faster cooling but at this time it works well.