Question about SPOM - Help Wanted!

[norwegiandupe]

Hey there!

 

I've finished my first SPOM after following the awesome guide of Jahws over on the Steam discussion boards, but I'm having trouble understanding how the wiring is supposed to work.

 

Seemingly following the guide means my conductive wire with a max of 2kW ends up bearing potentially more, and I've already seen overload damage to some (locked-in) wire parts.

I understand the SPOM is supposed to be self-sufficient with energy, but I dont understand how that's supposed to be possible if it's all one one circuit with 2kw?

The aquatuner alone is 1200w, and the five gas pumps total to another 1200.

 

See screenshots for my layout.

 

What am I getting wrong here?

Thanks!

[TheMule]

The two grids are clearly separated:

In step 4, you add a generator above the aquatuner:

Still they are two separated grid, with separated generators and smart batteries.

[KittenIsAGeek]

 

On 4/1/2020 at 12:09 AM, norwegiandupe said:

I understand the SPOM is supposed to be self-sufficient with energy, but I dont understand how that's supposed to be possible if it's all one one circuit with 2kw?

The SPOM is self-sufficient because of the hydrogen it produces by electrolysis.  Some of that hydrogen is spent to produce power to run the system.  The rest of the hydrogen can be burned to provide power elsewhere.  This has nothing to do with the actual electric grid, but instead only deals with the power necessary to produce more hydrogen.

Thus when designing your SPOM, you should think about how you want the power applied.  This is where your electric grid comes into play.  As you have observed, at times there is more power being used than your wiring grid can handle.  @TheMule, above, gives a solution to the problem -- but there are many more solutions.  For example, you have two hydrogen generators above your electrolyzers.  One could be on a circuit (with the smart battery) to produce only the power to run the electrolyzers and pumps.  The actual electrolysis (including liquid and gas pumps to keep everything moving) uses at most (with your current design) 1440 watts, so your wire is just fine.   The other hydrogen generator could be connected to your main grid, kicking on when power is needed.  Your main grid, then, can be connected to the aquatuner.  With your current design, the aquatuner will not run very often once everything is at steady state.  The time-average power costs of running the aquatuner is less than the surplus of hydrogen produced by your SPOM, so even though it isn't specifically self-contained, it still qualifies as self-sufficient.  

There is yet another possible solution:  Remember, while running, your aquatuner will need 1200 watts all by itself.  Another way you can solve the problem is to use automation to limit the number of pumps that will run while the aquatuner is on, keeping your power requirements below the 2000 watts that will melt conductive wire.  In your current design, the total power requirements of your build are 2640 watts.  That's 640 more than your wire can handle.  If you use logic to disable two of your bottom gas pumps while the aquatuner is running, then that reduces the total maximum load by 480 watts, giving your maximum load a total of 2160 watts -- still above your maximum, but not quite as much.  Disabling the hydrogen pump while the aquatuner is running removes another 240 watts from the load, putting you at 1920 watts -- keeping your wires safe.  As I pointed out above, once you've reached steady-state, the aquatuner will not be kicking on very often, so the reduced oxygen production from disabling two pumps when the aquatuner is running will probably not even be noticed.

** bad math.

Note: Disabling the hydrogen pump while the aquatuner is running will delay the availability of the hydrogen, so it is recommended that you do this only after you've reached thermal steady-state.  

[TheMule]

Quote

@TheMule, above, gives a solution to the problem

I was referring to Jahws' guide on steam. Those picture are linked from that directly. All credit to Jahws. Apologies for the confusion.

The OP apparently missed that, but it was right there in the original guide.

[hypoeffort]

I honestly got sick of building spoms and just went with one gigantic vertical rectangle.   i stick the Electrolyzer's somewhere center with o2 pumps at the bottom  and hydrogen pumps at the top.  You will need to power it with a grid a bit of your own power at first but it still burns off the excess Hydrogen for batteries.  I use your strategy with the 2 doors around your pump at the very top of the spom, I use tiles though.  Throw an atmo sensor on one side and a gas element on the opposite with an AND gate.   Its the easiest thing to scale up and if its large enough I have been chucking in a pincha pepper farm for cooling/food as well.   Good way to utilize the heat till you find other means.  Once you get enough power going you can chuck in a gas filter or 2 to deal with any CO2 or H

[GooseSalad]

42 minutes ago, Shocker said:

I honestly got sick of building spoms and just went with one gigantic vertical rectangle. 

I honestly like simple designs such as these, but in the case of a SPOM, the Rodriguez and it's variants simply top of their class just because of their compact design and efficiency. When you start to add gas filters to these designs they often use more electricity than they make, and early on in the game that electricity could be used elsewhere.

[sheaker]

Is really any setup needed? For example I have one Electrolyzer near the center of base and gas pump at the top of my base. Hydrogen is rising to the top so with simple element sensor it is easy to collect only hydrogen. To cool down oxygen few tempshift plates, two weezworts and one radiant pipe with cold carbon dioxide is fair enough.

[Gurgel]

On 4/3/2020 at 10:13 PM, Shocker said:

I honestly got sick of building spoms and just went with one gigantic vertical rectangle. 

I never used them at all. They are extremely wasteful as the O2 has to be pumped. It is far easier to let O2 and H2 separate by gravity and only pump (and filter) the H2 when enough has accumulated. I estimate that cuts down on electricity used by a factor of 3 before you have suits and maybe 1.5 with suits (where it usually stops to matter). The SPOM is one of these "cookie-cutter" designs that "everybody" uses, but that are not very good when you get into the details. As for the "giant rectangle, I simply use my base:

 

The hydrogen pump is driven by a H2 sensor and delay below. (Blue Puft before it in this screenshot). There is a second lower H2 sensor that forces the hydrogen generators to run if too much H2 piles up. You could probably do without the first sensor and the filter, but the filter consumes so little additional power it hardly matters. 

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

8 hours ago, Gurgel said:

It is far easier to let O2 and H2 separate by gravity and only pump (and filter) the H2 when enough has accumulated.

I used to do it that way.  It works great -- usually.  But lately I've been building my bases organically, so its much more simple for me to pipe the oxygen where I want it rather than just letting it disperse.  Thus I end up with something like this:

Spoiler

Side note: Ethanol coolers work better with one more unit height in the ethanol room.  Oh well.  Next time.

[Gurgel]

19 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I used to do it that way.  It works great -- usually. 

Actually, Oxygen dispersion can be a bit tricky if you do not pump it. I had to add Electrolyzer 3 because the glass tiles above and below the "decor bomb" on the right did slow dispersion far too much. With it, I am nicely above 1kg/tile all over the base.

In the end, it is a matter of convenience. I could just have added some pumps without filters as well.

 

[psusi]

On 4/5/2020 at 8:11 AM, Gurgel said:

The SPOM is one of these "cookie-cutter" designs that "everybody" uses, but that are not very good when you get into the details. As for the "giant rectangle, I simply use my base:

How the heck are you keeping your plants from overheating?  The gas coming out of the electrolyzers is 70+C so that will cook your plants ( and your dupes ).

 

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, psusi said:

How the heck are you keeping your plants from overheating?  The gas coming out of the electrolyzers is 70+C so that will cook your plants ( and your dupes ).

Ah, sorry. My approach need feeding with water a bit below the intended target temperature, usually 18...30C depending on whether there are plants to be cooled and what temperature they need. In fact, I usually use the water-stream to the electrolyzers for base cooling as well. The electrolyzer output is then directly cooled like this:

If you do have to cool that water explicitly, that does take more energy than only cooling the Oxygen generated. The overall energy calculation will then depend on whether you start with 30C water, 95C water or "cool" steam. If you have a cool slush geyser and any other water, you can just mix the target temperature.

Alternatively, you can use this cooling approach but feed the electrolyzer with warmer water, which eliminates the cooling disadvantage. I never found that necessary so far though.

[TheMule]

 

1 hour ago, psusi said:

The gas coming out of the electrolyzers is 70+C so that will cook your plants ( and your dupes ).

Slowly. And heat tends to go up, having your farm belows the electrolyzers helps a lot, they are virtually insulated from hot oxygen.
Anyway, most SPOM designs don't have an integrated cooling solution, and frankly I've never bothered with cooling the oxygen, and later I just cool the whole base with a pwater loop which vastly overpowers hot oxygen.

Admittedly, the hot hydrogen is quite more problematic but apparently he stores it in tanks where heat exchange isn't that great.


The real reason why people like SPOMs is that they are fire and forget things that never break as long as you provide water. You can completely overhaul your power grid, make mistakes doing so, create brownouts, break circuits open by mistake, overload something... all that and your SPOM is safely on a different circuit (its own). They are not optimized, they are reliable.

I do love SPOMs even if later I may connect them to the main grid in such a way that the internal generators are used only as backup. I do that when I start collecting hydrogen for the space program.

[Gurgel]

2 hours ago, TheMule said:

Admittedly, the hot hydrogen is quite more problematic but apparently he stores it in tanks where heat exchange isn't that great.

Everything that comes out of the electrolyzer gets cooled directly to just a few degrees C above the feed-water temperature. My vurrent base feeds with 18C water, but feeding with 25C or 30C or even higher would not be an issue as all the farming is outside ("natural" Sleet Wheat and Peppernuts).

2 hours ago, TheMule said:

The real reason why people like SPOMs is that they are fire and forget things that never break as long as you provide water. You can completely overhaul your power grid, make mistakes doing so, create brownouts, break circuits open by mistake, overload something... all that and your SPOM is safely on a different circuit (its own). They are not optimized, they are reliable.

No argument about that. If you want some no-brain reliable and dependable solution, they are the way to go. There is absolutely nothing bad in going in that direction for this aspect of the game. I am merely pointing out that alternatives exist, and while some of them may be more efficient (see mine, for example), they require custom engineering and optimization and may have surprising behavior (a.k.a. "Oh, ****!"-potential  ).

Some people play the game for doing custom engineering (I do to a large degree and I always go for KISS as I view that as the highest form of the art), others do not care or only care in some aspects. That is perfectly fine. One of the really impressive aspects of ONI is that while you absolutely have to solve some tough problems, there are many, many different solutions that all work.

[TheMule]

4 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Everything that comes out of the electrolyzer gets cooled directly to just a few degrees C above the feed-water temperature. My vurrent base feeds with 18C water, but feeding with 25C or 30C or even higher would not be an issue as all the farming is outside ("natural" Sleet Wheat and Peppernuts).

yeah I read your post after I posted mine... I never assume cold water because it's hard to come by. Most water sources in game are 95C or above. Maybe I'm being unlucky but the polluted water variants (-10C and 30C) are very rare in my playthoughs. But yeah, if you have one of those cooling your base (or your oxygen) is trivial.

 

 

4 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I am merely pointing out that alternatives exist,

I totally agree. It's just that for me, they don't involve electrolyzers

If I'm feeling fancy, I go for polluted water offgassing.

[ZanthraSW]

If you are using open air electrolyzers, you may end up getting less hydrogen than you could be. If the electrolyzer does not have an adjacent tile of hydrogen that it can be added to, it will often just delete the hydrogen instead of producing it. This is common enough that despite the lack of oxygen pumps, they may not produce more spare power than a SPOM will.  Almost every SPOM design guarantees a hydrogen tile that the electrolyzer can produce to, so there is no lost hydrogen.

This can be avoided in open air electrolyzers by placing a triangle of three airtight blocks over the electrolyzer to make an open tile for hydrogen to be produced in at the cost of more overpressure events on the electrolyzer. If you try this, you may be very surprised at how much hydrogen gets produced by the electrolyzer.

[Gurgel]

3 minutes ago, ZanthraSW said:

If you are using open air electrolyzers, you may end up getting less hydrogen than you could be.

I doubt it. Placement seems to play a role, but overall the process looks far less critical than some people make it out to be.

[sheaker]

On 4/8/2020 at 5:42 PM, TheMule said:

Anyway, most SPOM designs don't have an integrated cooling solution

Here is the solution I found on internet and test it with success. Unfortunately it is very sensitive to initial conditions. I had to delete oxygen from upper part of the chamber three times before it finally stabilize (sandbox). That' why hydrogen generator is damaged.

Automation is just a switch that is turning on/off every machine inside.

 

 

[Denisetwin]

43 minutes ago, sheaker said:

Unfortunately it is very sensitive to initial conditions. I had to delete oxygen from upper part of the chamber three times before it finally stabilize (sandbox). That' why hydrogen generator is damaged.

I've used variants of this for a very long time.  My solution became to run the initial cycles off a different power source (can even be a dupe wheel if necessary) and send all the output of the "hydrogen" pump to a gas filter and filter only hydrogen into a gas reservoir.  (assuming the Oxygen pumps were going directly to my base, I didn't care if a stray hydrogen pumped there)  Once the system stabilized, I deleted the gas filter, hooked the hydrogen pump directly to the gas reservoir that only had hydrogen, hooked the power to the hydrogen generator and went from there.