Polluted water germ help

[Nerokiwi]

Hi fellow duplicant. 

 

I need help with polluted water germs. No matter what I do, germ start proliferating as soon water get out of the pipe. 

I tryied everything: keeping the water under chlorine (tank says it has no more germ after a while), then i got the water outside (right tank) and... boom. germ start proliferating. 

Now I even put a filter over the pipe, to allow only clean water. nothing. as soon the water get out it start getting germs. 

 

where I am doing it wrong? this is the first time I have such persistent germs problem. 

[OxCD]

Please add your liquid layer, or we will not be able to see your disinfection system in place. And the automation one.

Also it seems your pH20 reservoirs are empty. Please note that the water must stay into the reservoirs to benefit from the chlorine disinfecting effect. And it would take some time, that's not instant.

[Soulwind]

You need to keep the water in the chlorine room until it's disinfected.  Putting the germ sensor way over by the outlet just turns off the outlet but the water that's already in the pipe is still infected.

The easiest way is to put the tanks onto doors and then open/close them using a timer.  1/2 a cycle or so in the tank, in chlorine, will disinfect the water before you let it out.  You can also put the germ sensor at the immediate output of the tanks and then loop back into the tanks if there's any germs in the water.

I use a slightly larger setup with 4 tanks (complete overkill, but I also use the same room to disinfect a full polluted water geyser output and it's the main water source for my base).  With the 4 tanks (2 each on a cycle timer) it ensures that any water always spends at least 1 full cycle (and usually longer) in the chlorine.  

Here's a picture of what I do.  Note that it doesn't need to be that complex.  I'm also using the 30 degree water from the geyser to cool down the area a bit (keep things at a stable temp) as my transformers for the base are in that area too.

[Steve8]

Even if you place the germ sensor right at the outlet of the tanks, you will have at least one packet sitting in the pipes leading to it that won't get disinfected.

There are two ways around that:

1.) Build the last tank on an airlock door. Deactivated tanks won't let out water

2.) Use a shutoff valve and loop back the water into the tanks as long as there are germs in it. When the valve is off water loops back. When it's on it has priority and lets out the water

[Artorias36]

 

I use this setup. Might not be the best but does its job. The germy water doesn't lose germs inside the pipes, so this loop allows to kill all the germs.

[psusi]

37 minutes ago, Artorias36 said:

 

I use this setup. Might not be the best but does its job. The germy water doesn't lose germs inside the pipes, so this loop allows to kill all the germs.

You forgot to use a bridge to inject the incoming water.  The way you have it connected, once the reservoirs fill up, the circulation will stop and the whole thing will deadlock.

[Artorias36]

It will never fill up. Thats the max per cycle and after less than one cycle all the germs are deleted.

[DemainaNyx]

It's hard to tell what's going on with just those overlay shots.  My best guess is that you aren't letting the water sit in the reservoirs long enough as is does take some time for the germs to be destroyed.  With a continuous flow of water, I believe you need 3 or 4 reservoirs in a row to ensure all the germs are killed without automation but you have to make sure the reservoirs are full first.  An easy way without automation is to make a loop by using a pipe bridge from the last reservoir back to the first one.  That way water is only kicked out when new water is added to the system ensuring that the reservoirs are always full.  This post here shows how they have theirs setup working if you need an example to get it going.

[psusi]

8 hours ago, Artorias36 said:

It will never fill up. Thats the max per cycle and after less than one cycle all the germs are deleted.

Is the output going to an infinite liquid storage?  Because otherwise if you have more water coming in than going out, the output pipe will back up and the tanks will fill.

[Nerokiwi]

i think i got it now. thanks for all the answers

Just as recap, if anyone come here looking for the same answer. 

Any sensor, shutoff, or loop* won't really work, as the item in the first segment of the pipe (under the sensor itself ironically) is polluted and not clean. 

 

With the door system instead, the pipes get empty, as the tank will accept new liquid, but not releasing any. 

 

thanks! 

 

[psusi]

25 minutes ago, Nerokiwi said:

Any sensor, shutoff, or loop* won't really work, as the item in the first segment of the pipe (under the sensor itself ironically) is polluted and not clean. 

No, looping with a sensor and shutoff works just fine, when you do it right.  Did you not see the example @Artorias36 posted?

[Nerokiwi]

Just now, psusi said:

No, looping with a sensor and shutoff works just fine, when you do it right.  Did you not see the example @Artorias36 posted?

is that "when you do it right" witch worries me. when I tryed it didn't worked out. i guess while building some pipe still have germs inside. 

[psusi]

8 minutes ago, Nerokiwi said:

is that "when you do it right" witch worries me. when I tryed it didn't worked out. i guess while building some pipe still have germs inside. 

@Soulwind pointed out what you did wrong:  you put the germ sensor far away from the shutoff.  It has to be in the very last pipe before the shutoff.  This is always the case when using a sensor to measure the contents of a pipe to control a shutoff.

[Steve8]

1 hour ago, Nerokiwi said:

i guess while building some pipe still have germs inside. 

Water in pipes doesn't interact with the chlorine. So you have to loop back the water into the reservoirs to clean those last one or two packets. If you haven't yet, learn how pipe priorities work. The input of a bridge or valve will have priority. So the water will go through the shutoff when it's open and into the loop when it's closed. And place your germ sensor directly at the output of the reservoir. That way you have less germy water in the pipes (but still a little).

The alternative is not to not let germy water out of the reservoir in the first place. That easiest way to do that is with the airlock door trick. Or you have several reservoirs in series, but then they always need to be full and you have a lot of water just sitting around in tanks.

The loop back design also works well with full or almost full tanks as that will greatly dilute the incoming water. It's possible to read the reservoir level and connect that and the germ sensor with an AND gate. But it's not always necessary.

If anything backs up really depends on the design. The toilets producing excess water doesn't have to cause issues either. Personally I like to to run it through a water sieve and dump the clean water into my main water tank and/or use it to feed bristle blossoms. So it all gets used up.

[Artorias36]

12 hours ago, psusi said:

Is the output going to an infinite liquid storage?  Because otherwise if you have more water coming in than going out, the output pipe will back up and the tanks will fill.

From the bathrooms the water goes into the water sieve. With a clock timer, the exceeded water goes into "decontamination room". After there is no germ due to the loop made by germ sensor + shutoff, the water goes back to the world, where a pump use it for coffè, electrolyzer etc.

This setup holds with 20 dupes and a 1800 grams of chlorine chamber. Not sure how it would behave with more dupes, but technically you could raise the chlorine to 5000 grams and have better effect too. I didn't put any liquid bridge cause if the sieve produce more waters than i can decontaminate, a liquid bridge won't do much, as the sieve will eventualy be blocked too.

Anyway i used this setup on a lot of bases some with 2000 cycles, it never failed.

The only issue is to find the plastic for the germ sensor, which based on the map you might not have access till a bit, unless you deconstruct some plastic ledder from POI.

[Brooh]

I've found using the cycle timer with a mechanized door under a reservoir works well early, I don't have plastic and get this set up just before swapping in plumbed sinks/toilets. The input goes into the liquid shutoff first, which is controlled by the cycle timer which turns it on at 1%, and runs for 40%. The door under the reservoir is controlled by another cycle timer, which starts at 0% (opening the door) and runs for 60%. This gives 40% cycle to fill the tank, 19% to finish cleaning the water, and 40% to drain. The liquid bridge feeds back into the toilets and sinks, and when that's full the rest drips out into my clean water storage.

Currently I have 12 dupes using this, plus a carbon skimmer cleaning up after my coal generators. Haven't hit cycle 100 yet and this is my second run at it after an initial goofing around learning the game run that was still going fine at 150 cycles. There's also a gas pump in there hooked to a filter off to the left, to pump all gasses out after building it and the filter returns chlorine to the vent, and I have a switch to cut power to those and also a switch to a pump in a nearby chlorine pocket to bring initial chlorine in. The little room has 700g of chlorine per tile, I haven't tried adding more to see if the higher concentration kills germs faster or not.

In front of this are 2 sieves fed by another "dirty" reservoir, all my polluted water starts there. Water enters the cleaning room at around 300k germs and then starts dropping as it's diluted, I just tested and it was at 216kg of water and 292 germs remaining at the the 41% mark, and no germs before hitting 50%. Second check after a cycle or two and it was 944kg and zero germs as the liquid shutoff stopped. Not sure why such a big difference there in volume, but more is better for faster disinfecting by dilution. So it can certainly process additional capacity.

The biggest downside to this tiny setup is that if I don't pay attention to when it reaches max daily capacity, the tanks will start backing up. Since I didn't leave spare room to expand or include an air lock entry, I'll have to build a larger replacement down the road if I want more than 12 dupes. Including a storage bin for bleach stone would be handy if the cleaning consumes any chlorine.

[Steve8]

9 hours ago, Artorias36 said:

This setup holds with 20 dupes and a 1800 grams of chlorine chamber. Not sure how it would behave with more dupes, but technically you could raise the chlorine to 5000 grams and have better effect too.

The amount of chlorine doesn't matter at all from what I can tell. Even tiny amounts work. I prefer around 2000 grams though. Then I can also drop slime into the chlorine chamber and it won't gas off

Quote

The only issue is to find the plastic for the germ sensor, which based on the map you might not have access till a bit, unless you deconstruct some plastic ledder from POI.

I found that a design with multiple tanks helps a lot. It takes a long time to fill them up so there is plenty of time to ranch some dreckos or get oil

Or build some temporary buffer reservoirs for a single reservoir design

[psusi]

10 hours ago, Artorias36 said:

but technically you could raise the chlorine to 5000 grams and have better effect too

The density of the chlorine doesn't matter.  It could be 1g and work the same.

10 hours ago, Artorias36 said:

The only issue is to find the plastic for the germ sensor, which based on the map you might not have access till a bit, unless you deconstruct some plastic ledder from POI.

I forgot they changed the ladders to plastic. That explains the puddle of naptha I found in the POI that breached the abyssalite between the cold biome and magma biomes.  At one point I think they were steel and before that, neutronium.

[Artorias36]

Weird months ago i saw a video tutorial on how to kill germs and using the edit mode the guy put 20k of chlorine and the germs were dead in a matter of seconds, but now that i think about he could have been used 10x speed too.