Cooling with the Ice Maker?

[Gurgel]

There has been some discussion about whether cooling options are too limited or not in the DLC. In a parallel discussion about electricity generation, some people seem to think everybody just rushes Solar Panels, which is clearly false as there are plenty of alternatives and Solar Panels are not even the most simple option due to the need for large-scale electricity storage and cooling of that storage. Also, "cookie cutter" solutions that just get copied are boring, while original solutions and things only a few people do are interesting. ONI is particularly well suited for inventive solutions, as it will give merciless feedback on what actually works and what does not. Anybody that has something in place that works can just ignore all discussions about whether it actually works, because they have actual proof. (As a side-remark, for a supposedly Science-based society, we see a lot of denial of Science and crude non-scientific theories pushed as "truth" these days, but that is a different discussion...)

I expect there will be quite a few people out there that have cooling solutions in place that do not use the cookie cutter AT+ST combo. Personally I have kept farming cool with the Ice Maker in the base game on Oassisse for quite a while (1000 cycles or so), so I would be interested what people actually use for longer term cooling. The the Ice Maker in combination with spot-cooling is just an example.

This very much is not a question about the "best" option or the "most efficient" one, but about what actually works and the larger the variety, the better. Ideally, we could collect a little catalog here with examples.

[Solon64]

The space biome is VERY cold. You can treat it like a huge heatsink for hundreds or even thousands of cycles. I dump my hot waste gasses and stuff up there. I also snake radiator pipes through it to cool my base down.

As to what *doesn't* work: trying to set up a nosh bean farm when you have no idea what you're doing. I first tried using a thermoregulator to cool it down. Way too slow. Then I pumped in ethanol, but forgot it was 100+°F. Had to pull it out. Spent a dozen cycles setting up a quick and dirty AT with all the headaches that come with it, rebuilding it and tinkering with it, got ethanol to the right temp, then realized the hydrofarm tiles were just heating it back up. Pull the pipes again. Left the AT on accidentally and started breaking pipes with frozen ethanol. Had planted the nosh beans so I was burning tons of dirt for nothing.

I finally tore the whole thing down in frustration. Didnt need them, I was just trying out an engineering project, but my god, that was awful.

So yeah: sometimes cookie cutter builds are acceptable, is the point of my story.

[Unfawkable]

I once tried to utilize the Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier, but I failed miserably at it as it proved very difficult to control for my desired temperature outcomes. Other than that, I've only used Aquatuner to create Steam for my rocket, all other cooling I've done via an obscene number of wheezeworts as I really like how simple they are to utilize.

Though now I'm very interested in the Ice Maker approach, do you use the fans to cool them, or do you just drop the ice on places in your base?

[Gurgel]

8 minutes ago, Unfawkable said:

Though now I'm very interested in the Ice Maker approach, do you use the fans to cool them, or do you just drop the ice on places in your base?

Just dropping the ice somewhere provides too little effect. I basically put in fans at several places and then had them active or not based on temperature. Ice-E fans do not have a control input, so I used doors below to control them. 

[Unfawkable]

11 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Just dropping the ice somewhere provides too little effect. I basically put in fans at several places and then had them active or not based on temperature. Ice-E fans do not have a control input, so I used doors below to control them. 

You could have probably done it with Duplicant access automation control, to forbid dupes from accessing it. I know it's more complicated, but I'm not a FAN (heh) of using doors to disable buildings.

On one hand it's simple, but it takes up my Dupe labor, so it's evenly like and dislike. I'll give it a go next time around I guess.

[TuxSam123]

7 hours ago, Gurgel said:

 some people seem to think everybody just rushes Solar Panels, which is clearly false as there are plenty of alternatives and Solar Panels are not even the most simple option due to the need for large-scale electricity storage and cooling of that storage. 

Well, I didn't. My base is entirely powered by coal generators, with a lot of automated hatch ranches which produce meat and eggs for me, as well as coal.

 

7 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I expect there will be quite a few people out there that have cooling solutions in place that do not use the cookie cutter AT+ST combo. Personally I have kept farming cool with the Ice Maker in the base game on Oassisse for quite a while (1000 cycles or so), so I would be interested what people actually use for longer term cooling. The the Ice Maker in combination with spot-cooling is just an example.

This very much is not a question about the "best" option or the "most efficient" one, but about what actually works and the larger the variety, the better. Ideally, we could collect a little catalog here with examples.

I always build a SPOM module combined with an AETN, which cools both my base and my oxygen.

5 hours ago, Unfawkable said:

I once tried to utilize the Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier, but I failed miserably at it as it proved very difficult to control for my desired temperature outcomes. 

I use a heat injector to get just the right temperature (it's not very accurate, but who cares?). It has a 5°C margin of error, so beware.

[Steve8]

7 hours ago, Unfawkable said:

I once tried to utilize the Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier, but I failed miserably at it as it proved very difficult to control for my desired temperature outcomes

You can build an airlock door under it to turn it on and off

[zach123b]

my favorite cooling some guy shared on discord was cooling using the fridge

the fridge cools food really quickly and loses that cold temp when it loses power.  so fill it with medicine and automate the power to it.  the cold food/medicine transfers heat to the ground tile really quickly causing it to chill the nearby area.  it still only goes down to 2c

i still havent tried building it ingame mostly because i'm hard headed

[Meltdown]

49 minutes ago, zach123b said:

my favorite cooling some guy shared on discord was cooling using the fridge

the fridge cools food really quickly and loses that cold temp when it loses power.  so fill it with medicine and automate the power to it.  the cold food/medicine transfers heat to the ground tile really quickly causing it to chill the nearby area.  it still only goes down to 2c

i still havent tried building it ingame mostly because i'm hard headed

This is pretty funny. "Fridge cools things" sounds logical in some non-scientific, casual sence, but is very different from the actual way fridge should work.

[NewWorldDan]

Still using the aquatuner, but it's integrated into my SPOM.  Water to the electrolyzers is heated to cool the oxygen coming out.  This is all easily powered by surplus hydrogen from the SPOM itself.  Water comes in at 50C, is fed to electrolyzers at 60C, oxygen is output at 20C, along with a cooling loop that covers other areas of base as well.  The best part?  The aquatuner is made out of copper ore.  Overheat temp is 125C.  If you research quickly, this can be built by cycle 25-30, never worry about heat in your base again.  

[evilcat19xx]

11 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Solar Panels are not even the most simple option

They are the most simple option. Super efficient, clean, and reliable. 

They can either nerf the solar panel power generation rate, or bring back the meteor shower as an optional setting for veteran players.

12 hours ago, Gurgel said:

cookie cutter AT+ST combo

When an option is dominantly better (AT+ST), most players won't bother with any other alternatives. 

Game design should be in a way that encourages players to become more creative.

ONI cheat codes:

• Solar panels, AT+ST, and rovers.
• Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start

12 hours ago, Gurgel said:

for longer term cooling

I have some cool slush geysers that produce very clod polluted and brine water(around -20) that I use to cool down the base in my current game. 
Then after the water temp reached above zero, I use them for the metal refinery.

[blakemw]

In general, the Cool Slush geyser on the starting asteroid is very potent. The average cool slush geyser, including dormant periods, provides cooling equal to:

• -10 to 0 C: 62.7 kDTU/s (e.g. Nosh/Wheat farms)
• 0 to 30 C: 188 kDTU/s (e.g. general base cooling)
• 30 to 100 C: 439 kDTU/s (e.g. industrial and steam turbine cooling)

For example this cooling would be enough to cool about 20 Nosh Sprouts consuming hot ethanol, 100 buildings that produce 1 kDTU/s of heat and 10 that produce 10 kDTU/s in a "30 C" zone of the base, and then to top it off, 5 Steam Turbines running full-bore on 200 C steam (using the cool water to cool steam turbines multiples the cooling approximately 10x if the heat source is above 125 C).

Now of course you might want to tap off some of that water along the way to be consumed by various things at a lower temperature, but any water that comes out the end could be electrolyzed and used to produce oxylite for a vast stockpile of rocket oxidizer, or the oxygen vented to space and the hydrogen used to just produce power.

And that doesn't even include the cold brine geyser which is good for about 82% as much cooling.

Overall on the starting asteroid there seems little reason to ever use an Aquatuner or any other cooling solution besides the cool geysers (and terrain based cooling), unless of course temperatures below -10 C are needed, such as freezing food.

[NewWorldDan]

2 minutes ago, blakemw said:

Nosh Sprouts consuming hot ethanol

If you're not heat exchanging the ethanol with the incoming wood (SHC a staggering 3.47, although the thermal conductivity is very low), you're doing it wrong.  Your incoming ethanol should be maybe 35C.  Wood has very low thermal conductivity, so it's best to run it on rails through metal tiles - create 3 large sections or so, separated by insulated tiles.  Counter flow the ethanol through radiant pipes.  Even if you're using the AT/ST to cool the nosh sprouts, you should still be heat exchanging the ethanol.

 

[blakemw]

14 minutes ago, NewWorldDan said:

If you're not heat exchanging the ethanol with the incoming wood (SHC a staggering 3.47, although the thermal conductivity is very low), you're doing it wrong. 

Well that's an option but it's not nessecarily wrong. Plants delete quite a bit of the heat in the liquid they receive, generally around half but it varies based on conductivity, so the hotter the liquid fed to the plant the more heat gets deleted and there's no general reason to use the cooling potential of lumber to cool ethanol. Now there is a specific reason why one might want to (actually it doesn't really matter whether you use the lumber for this or something else, besides convenience), if there is only a limited amount of high-grade cooling available (like in this case around 62 kDTU/s of sub-zero cooling), and you want to leverage that even more, say 20 Nosh Sprouts aren't enough, and you want 100 Nosh Sprouts, then cooling the ethanol by whatever means are available means less heat gets deleted overall (because the plants are deleting less heat), but the sub-zero cooling goes further. But whether it's useful or not depends entirely on how much stuff you actually need to keep very cold.

[NewWorldDan]

2 minutes ago, blakemw said:

Well that's an option but it's not nessecarily wrong. Plants delete quite a bit of the heat in the liquid they receive, generally around half but it varies based on conductivity, so the hotter the liquid fed to the plant the more heat gets deleted and there's no general reason to use the cooling potential of lumber to cool ethanol. Now there is a specific reason why one might want to (actually it doesn't really matter whether you use the lumber for this or something else, besides convenience), if there is only a limited amount of high-grade cooling available (like in this case around 62 kDTU/s of sub-zero cooling), and you want to leverage that even more, say 20 Nosh Sprouts aren't enough, and you want 100 Nosh Sprouts, then cooling the ethanol by whatever means are available means less heat gets deleted overall (because the plants are deleting less heat), but the sub-zero cooling goes further. But whether it's useful or not depends entirely on how much stuff you actually need to keep very cold.

My main point is that the ethanol distiller deletes whatever heat you put into the lumber - up to at least 73C - when it makes the ethanol.  The 3 things the ethanol distiller produces are all vastly lower in heat content than the lumber.  Ethanol boils at 78, so you don't want to go above that.

It's a lot like the electrolyzer.  The more heat you dump into your input, the more heat it destroys.

[Hayate108]

It turn out there is very few way to direct delete heat 2 of it

And most useful is delete the gas itself(burning,suck,or just exposed to space)

Most building in Utilities focus on transfer heat

ice maker is get heat out of 30kgwater stack about 150kg -20c ice

Then dupe will turn the ice fan a whole cycle to cool off only a small area

Very slow and impractical

I usually take alternative way

the " ice block" which take 400kg of ice

then It melted itself without dupe

But problem is the out run water and take some time to build

 

And making the ice also has alternative way

Like 1kg  into AT or dip into cold area

Sometimes it turn into soild (loss half mass)

 

Ice maker most major issues is

It can't automatic like using autosweepy to supply water

And if you take out the ice ,it melt

 

Recycling the water of the ice fan has same issue and dupe only takes 30kg to run a whole way back on

 

Ice block required construct order ofcourse

But it can auto sweep by sweep or just plumbing it out

The ice fan also using pollution water and then  p oxygen everywhere again

 

If we don't want cooling there's pretty easy way to heat air and water up

Witch only make to 70c 

 

Life in ONI just not easy as Rimworld

Right?

[0xFADE]

Last I heard the ice makers were very good for heat deletion.  I'm not sure if they have been nerfed since then.

Still simple heat sinks are great.  You can store a LOT of heat in tiles.  The heat range of water does limit that amount but something simple like that should get you by till you can get oil and steam generators.  That is when heat becomes another resource to exploit.

Getting stable power early on is harder for me.

[gabberworld]

 

7 hours ago, zach123b said:

my favorite cooling some guy shared on discord was cooling using the fridge

the fridge cools food really quickly and loses that cold temp when it loses power.  so fill it with medicine and automate the power to it.  the cold food/medicine transfers heat to the ground tile really quickly causing it to chill the nearby area.  it still only goes down to 2c

i still havent tried building it ingame mostly because i'm hard headed

 

someone posted in this forum as well that he uses fridge, and funny is im actually using this .

[DarkMaster13]

Ice makers are generally just for early game cooling.  Or rather, heat moving.  They make more heat than they remove from the ice.  So you can put one in a corner somewhere to make ice then use ice-e-fans to cool the area you need cooled.  Most often this would be used on a map like arideo to scrape together a mealwood farm.  If you're pretty experienced at the game you'll generally have unlocked better options by the time you need cooling on other maps or design your bases such that you don't need the cooling.

[Nebbie]

1 hour ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Ice makers are generally just for early game cooling.  Or rather, heat moving.  They make more heat than they remove from the ice.  So you can put one in a corner somewhere to make ice then use ice-e-fans to cool the area you need cooled.  Most often this would be used on a map like arideo to scrape together a mealwood farm.  If you're pretty experienced at the game you'll generally have unlocked better options by the time you need cooling on other maps or design your bases such that you don't need the cooling.

The Ice Maker most certainly cools more than it heats. It removes .16K/s of heat from 30kg of water. .16K/s * 30,000g * 4.179J/K/g = 20,059.2J/s (DTU/s in ONI terms), beating out its 16,000DTU/s output.
There's a bit of a complication with ice's lower SHC, but the Ice Maker strangely accounts for it by increasing the rate of temperature loss to account for it, and of course you'll want to melt the ice anyways for heat removal.
Anyways, the problem with cooling with it is actually the Ice-E Fan, which just plain takes too much labor for what it does, and has barely any range. All the dupe labor involved makes the whole idea pretty terrible.

Now, to address the OP:
Are cooling options too limited? Yes. The DLC actually makes cooling better, but there's just no competing with the ridiculousness of Steam Turbines.
Is solar overpowered? Yes, to the point they nerfed it in 2 different ways, which sadly didn't actually address the issue and just kicked it down to being "lategame". You talk of cooling down batteries being an issue...but actually, Battery Modules (the ones you build on rockets and can totally stick in the middle of your base) produce no heat (on top of leaking less power and being more efficient for materials...).

[Gurgel]

8 hours ago, Nebbie said:

You talk of cooling down batteries being an issue...but actually, Battery Modules (the ones you build on rockets and can totally stick in the middle of your base) produce no heat (on top of leaking less power and being more efficient for materials...).

That, I expect, will go away. 

[Nebbie]

4 hours ago, Gurgel said:

That, I expect, will go away. 

Maybe, but the discussion is about the current state of things, not a hypothetical future, ergo Battery Modules annihilate your point about battery heat. If we for a moment assume they produced the same heat or were off-limits, then it's very worth noting you can shove 10 Jumbo Batteries up at the top of the starting asteroid and they'll take something like 1000 cycles to even bring it to room temperature, so I don't think heat really balances solar panels on at least the starting asteroid.

Now, as to the likelihood of such a change...I think it requires secondary changes. Jumbo Batteries have always felt on the punishing side with their heat production and power loss, so just making Battery Modules as bad as them would probably be a bit of an issue.
I think they do need some heat production, but you can't just have rockets slowly heat up until they melt on the pad, so Klei would absolutely have to implement space radiative cooling to buildings alongside that that can keep up.
That would make it a heat problem to shove the Battery Module in a corner of the base, but still leave it powerful up in space, which I think is alright...but that would still mean that solar isn't a problem for battery heat.

All in all, I am really hoping for Solar to stop requiring Materials Science research, but start having to deal with a longer night. Longer night is just so reliable, because it both requires more batteries for it and lowers average power output.

[ZombieDupe]

In all honesty many of the alternative methods for cooling (not cool slush geysers or Aqua Tuner/Steam Turbine setups) for the most part seem ultimately too terrible to compete for me. At the end of the day what matters is the cooling potential of net heat in kDtus deleted. With cold geysers it entirely depends on what building or plant consumes the heated up liquid at what rate, like pre-cooled electrolyzers allowing for cold brine to precool the oxygen and plenty more things before being desalinated and capped out to 45C water and then being consumed by the electrolyzers.

I did some rough estimations based on the oni-db site's info and the ice maker removes about 4 kDtus/s. In contrast, the Steam Turbine removes almost 800 kDtu/s which is nearly x200 as much, meaning you would need around two hundred Ice Makers to match one Steam Turbine. Not only is that a lot of power wasted, it's a lot of wasted space. You lose out even more on cooling if the power you generate for the Ice Makers is made by buildings that generate even more heat, while a steam turbine actively generates power while at the same time deleting much more heat. For most colony critical things you probably don't need this much cooling, but if you try to eliminate the method and try to use some heavy heat generation machinery, it seems pointless not to use the much more cleaner and compact solutions.

I can see AETN and wheezeworts being decent cooling methods if they deleted x10 heat/second than they do now without breaking balance, because one is a very rare building and the other is a biological solution and both are somewhat limited so this increase in cooling would still not eliminate the need for AQ/ST in many situations. With ice makers I'm not entirely sure, making them better at deleting heat, you could end up making cooling on par with heating as is the case with the liquid tepidiser. They are a viable method for some things, but you just need way too many of them or just expect to do a lot of math to keep things compact and balanced.

For these reasons I end up using the AQ/ST method for most things, and slush geysers for the basics if I can take advantage of that. Sometimes I might use an AETN if it's in a convenient place for sleet wheat and a couple of wheezeworts just to keep a few plants that consume excess lavatory water cool due to their awkward placement. Have yet to see a reason to use the ice makers especially considering how ineffective they are individually.

[Nebbie]

2 minutes ago, ZombieDupe said:

In all honesty many of the alternative methods for cooling (not cool slush geysers or Aqua Tuner/Steam Turbine setups) for the most part seem ultimately too terrible to compete for me. ...

...you would need around two hundred Ice Makers to match one Steam Turbine....

I can see AETN and wheezeworts being decent cooling methods if they deleted x10 heat/second than they do now without breaking balance...

Wheezes used to be competitive for cooling, being good for small enclosed things. Then they got a fertilization requirement, and wild ones got their cooling quartered. Because they now require labor, it's pointless to try to use them as a sealed solution vs. just running another cooling loop, and because their wild cooling is terrible, it's not worth having Pips plant them and Cold biomes are fragile.
The Ice Maker is in a similar boat. it used to delete 5x the heat, but then it got nerfed to its current state.

In general, it seems like Klei wants everyone using Aquatuner-based heat deletion, to force steel production as the only goal in the game. There are Steam Turbine-free Aquatuner methods, like dumping the heated fluid medium to space or feeding it to plants, but they're usually just "I don't have plastic yet" and of course you're dumping what could be free power.
I'm holding out some hope they recognize that things in space exposure should radiate heat away at a given rate, since trying to cool things in space is a nightmare (you basically need drywall and either water drip or an oil blob to get a cooling loop to work), but their history on cooling solutions is...worrying.

[psusi]

23 hours ago, Hayate108 said:

I usually take alternative way

the " ice block" which take 400kg of ice

then It melted itself without dupe

But problem is the out run water and take some time to build

No, the real problem is that when you turn the ice into the building, it acts like it has 1/5th of its mass so you are giving up 80% of the cooling capacity that ice had.