Cooling base with pipes

[TheEvilMango]

I'm planing on cooling my base by running pipes though it with a cold liquid. What pipes would be best? I think I heard somewhere that it's a good idea to use regular pipes made of granite. But wouldn't It be better to use raidant?

[SharraShimada]

Depends on your progress and how much you need to cool. You may use regular pipes, if you only have a decent amount of heat to get rid of. Say your base heats only 1-2° per Cycle, this will do fine. If you encounter heavy heat to get rid off, you better use radiant pipes. But they cost you large amounts of metal.

[abud]

Both true, in their context. Probably better if we understand why granite, why aluminum radiant (you didn't specify material, I assume aluminum as an example). For cooling pipe generally we need faster heat transfer, so higher thermal conductivity is better. To check it, we didn't even need to build one, from planning is enough

From those numbers, it is obvious you're right. However, probably you heard that granite is a good idea is taking material cost into consideration.

[6Havok9]

Radiant pipes are expensive. For long sections where precise temperature control is not needed, granite is just fine.

Also, if you pipe let's say water coming right from a slush geyser, radiant pipes will make the first section they hit frozen cold, which is not great.

Temperatures will equalize over time, but that's also true with granite pipes. Not worth the metal cost imho, and potentially bad when using crude or "this will work, for now" (because they don't even deserve to be called temporary) setups.

[Nebbie]

15 minutes ago, TheEvilMango said:

I'm planing on cooling my base by running pipes though it with a cold liquid. What pipes would be best? I think I heard somewhere that it's a good idea to use regular pipes made of granite. But wouldn't It be better to use raidant?

One thing to consider is that if you use radiant pipes all throughout, and a very long piping loop, with lots of heat producers spread out, the areas at the start of the loop will be much colder. Personally, my approach is to put radiant pipes on sections where heat producers are, and igneous insulated pipes on all other sections, so cooling is greatly focused where it's needed. Keep in mind that radiant piping is expensive, being made of refined metals, and so is best kept to a minimum unless you find find 40 tons of lead in an oil biome nextdoor.

[greggbert]

It might be better to pump your oxygen through the cold biome inside radiant or granite pipes, then use insulated pipes to bring the cold O2 to yoru base, then vent it directly in.   Better yet, you could just produce your oxygen in the cold biome like dis:

[nakomaru]

Granite was the highest conductivity before radiant pipes, so you are likely just getting your information from 2017.

[Lifegrow]

2 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Granite was the highest conductivity before radiant pipes, so you are likely just getting your information from 2017.

Wolframite  

[nakomaru]

You got me.

[Coolthulhu]

To maximize radiant pipe output, build them in tiles and radiate the heat from those with tempshift plates.

Gas doesn't transmit heat that well unless you're flooding your colony with hydrogen.

[beowulf2010]

I find radiant pipes to be both too expensive and overkill for general full base cooling. 

I use a loop of granite pipes in granite tiles within the outer shell if igneous insulation and this is more than adequate assuming minimal heat sources (cooking, research, lights) and <40C toilet water and O2 supplies. 

[Promethien]

Regular pipes don't have a decor hit as well.

[bobucles]

Normal bases have virtually no sources of heat and a lot of area to cover, so granite pipes will work just fine. Radiant pipes are more important when you need to move all the heat in less than 10 tiles, and bases are typically larger than that.

[avc15]

hi folks,

Cooling with pipes is extremely power efficient when compared to other ways (especially when compared with gas vents)

Mostly because the aquatuner is the most power efficient building for cooling, and pipes hold more mass than gas vents. But conveyors hold even more mass than pipes.

From a perspective of "which option is strictly best" - having radiant pipes lets you have more precise & targetted cooling, spend less power circulating coolant (by virtue of circulating less coolant & still drawing more energy into this less amount of coolant) but it also costs way more materials. Examples below.

(This is an example from an Aridio base, by the way, which I consider to be one of the more challenging starts but one of the less challenging long games)

I'm cooling my base with automated cooling zones. In the following picture you will see 5 cooling zones, dedicated to farming bristle blossoms. Each cooling zone consists of one temp sensor, a liquid shutoff and a flow control valve:

See the thing is radiant pipe cooling is much more expensive than just the 50kg of refined metal per segment of radiant pipe. The coolant in these pipes sucks in so much heat that you need something to buffer & even out heat in the area. Without temp shift plates, you won't get the desired result. You can start with about half of what I have here, and lead works fine (except in cases of extreme heat flux) - that's good, because lead is available in such huge quantities, & accessible as soon as you have atmo suits:

Without tempshift plates, you don't get that even temperature across the cooling zone. All the cooling concentrates at the beginning of your radiant pipe.

Cooling zones are rather small and don't require much piping. They each target a very small area:

... The tempshift plates cost many times more refined metal than the piping.

Control is simple. Supply cooling water at 1-5C in your cooling supply header. Turn on the cooling supply if temperature goes above the set point, but throttle down with the flow control valve to supply small packets.

Dump all spent coolant into a return header that goes back to your aquatuners. I use packet stackers to reduce the number of packets in my pipes, it saves frames.

I hope it's somewhat informative. This represents one hyper efficient way to do things. But it costs some serious resources. Temp shift plates made of refined metal are very spendy.

[Siromatik]

7 hours ago, avc15 said:

Without tempshift plates, you don't get that even temperature across the cooling zone. All the cooling concentrates at the beginning of your radiant pipe.

Used a similar approach as you, with specific pipes where I need specific cooling and little liquid packet.
Now I just let full 10kg cool liquid packet running in an infinity loop, so the temp will stabilise over time and avoiding the use of tempshift plate most of the time. When the liquid loop goes too hot the system dump liquid into the sewerage system and take some new fresh liquid. Cool and sewer pipeline in a big circle all around the base with ~5-10°C P.Water.
Anyway I think both approach dump and need to cool back same amount of liquid over time.
Just trying to build less tempshift, its long to build and ressource expensive as you said. No need for packet stackers too.

[7 and 4]

For nonenclosed builds I usually build them from whatever, let the loop run for a couple of cycles and THEN open the heat overlay and sprinkle radiant pipes wherever needed.

Spoiler

Wanted to put something in this spoiler, decided against it and now I can't figure how to edit the spoiler out of the post...