It's stuffy in here...

[GuyPerfect]

The one thing I never really worked out was what to do with ambient heat in the Duplicants' general work area. From the outset, it's intuitive to organize everything in One Big Room™ then branch off to specialty rooms from there, but in the long term this doesn't seem to be working out very well because of heat. It's too hot to breathe. Fundamentally, my issue stems from the use of the Electrolyzer: it produces 70 degree breathable Oxygen, which is then piped all around the One Big Room™, eventually causing the whole thing to be disruptively hot. It takes a while, but it always happens and I'd like to have a general solution for it.

I've identified three potential remedies:

1. Find a way to condition the Oxygen coming out of the Electrolyzer to always be of a desired temperature. There are machines specifically for this purpose (in both gas and liquid varieties), so perhaps by utilizing those and managing their thermals I could work out a solution. I'd like to avoid using things like Wheezeworts or Anti-Entropy Thermal Nullifiers because while certainly useful, they depend on dumb luck moreso than engineering. This is an engineering challenge.
2. Abandon the One Big Room™ design and employ targeted climate control to Duplicant living and working areas. This could be as simple as boxing in a relatively small area and dropping in an Ice-E Fan or two. Trending towards more complex solutions, I could establish a chill chest of sorts where hot Oxygen goes to cool off before being sent to the climate-controlled area. This is related to point 1., though on a smaller scale.
3. Keep on the move. As one area becomes inhospitable, carve out a new one. There are naturally cold areas strewn about, so even without implementing specific cooling tech, it will take a very long time to heat up the entire asteroid cluster to the point that the Duplicants will be in any peril. My personal end goal involves the Temporal Tear anyway, so it doesn't need to be sustainable indefinitely.

I'm interested to learn how other people are addressing the atmospheric heat issue. It's the sort of problem that has a wide number of potential solutions, so it should be a fascinating time mulling over everyone's ideas. How do you do it?

[Joe Dee]

Specifically regarding the electrolyzer, I just snake a few radiant pipes with chilled Polluted Water through and the oxygen with its low heat capacity gets cool very quickly. This works for designs where you pump it out or where you let it flow out on its own. When pumping it out, I sometimes build a small heat exchanger for it instead, 2x5 tiles of polluted water with radiant gas pipes for the oxygen and radiant liquid for the chilled polluted water.

I mean generally you need some sort of cooling system anyway, with AT+Steam engine and then various heat exchangers to provide defined temperature levels in different places.

[6Havok9]

As a permanent solution, cooling oxygen at the source is the best option. An aquatuner running on pwater goes a long way.

Dupes are sweating in the One Big Room. You send cool oxygen in, oxygen absorbs heat, dupes breathe it and *poof* goes the heat. Yup, dupes destroy heat and mass. Ambient temperature will trend towards o2 temp.

Although I've opted to TEMPORARILY relocate something out of laziness quite a number of times. Or just TEMPORARILY slap ice tempshift plates here and there.

Ok, many times. Nothing that can't be fixed! ..later.

[QuQuasar]

Using a self-powered machine to put cooled oxygen into pipes is the most 'side-effect free' means of electrolyzing water. This makes it excellent for beginners: you don't need to deal with heat or loose hydrogen in your base, low-pressure area's can be easily addressed with another gas pipe and vent, and about the only thing that can go wrong is running out of water.

However, I avoid it because depending on the design, it ranges from "waste of power" to "massive waste of power". 

Fundamentally, you want the oxygen in your base, not in pipes. You don't actually need to spend power pumping it, because that's where the electrolyzer puts it by default. 

Which still leaves the matter of cooling. For me, ol' faithful is a loop of granite pipes in the floors, connected to one of these somewhere outside your base:

 

There are plenty of improvements to be made to this design: a heat exchanger will allow you to more specifically target a coolant temperature, and a steam turbine and steel aquatuner will never overheat. But the point is that this can be thrown up in any liquid pool on the map as soon as you unlock the aquatuner, and even in it's most basic form will buy you hundreds of cycles of cooling.

[Mastermindx]

You didn't specify if you wanted an early, mid or late game solution. Your #3 suggest a pretty early game solution as constantly moving isn't really suitable solution late game.

I find heat early game to be really tricky to deal with. That's why I usually rush Steam Turbine/Aquatuner. That's also allow me to solve 2 problems in 1 go, obtain a renewable source of water and get some cooling.

(Exact design still needs improvements...)

The Atmo sensor allow water to "escape the loop" when pressure is getting too high inside the steam chamber. What is also nice, is that this water is 95 C, the perfect temperature to feed in electrolyzer (Perfect in the sense that electrolyzer "delete" heat.)

Then I pass the aquatuner cooled liquid through a heat exchanger, in this case, gold radiant pipe going through gold metal tile.

And I have the oxygen from my electrolyzer go through the same metal tiles in radiant pipe. 

Now, I'm not sure what the right terminology would be to describe this system but lets call it a 2 tier heat exchange.  That makes it slightly hard to control the output temperature precisely.  A 3 tier (for which I have no example at the moment), would allow for better "tuning" of the output temperature since the middle tier could decide to exchange heat (or not) with the aquatuner cooled liquid to have a narrower range of output temperature for the oxygen. 

[Jann5s]

Just another solution: often we use cold water to feed the electrolyzer (eg coming from a slush geyser). If you route the cold water through the hot oxygen before feeding it to the electrolyzer you get your cooling for free-ish.

 

Arg, this was already proposed by Joe Dee, ignore this post.

[tuxii]

Here is an example of what @Joe Dee and @Jann5s suggest from my current playthrough.

Spoiler

My system is fed by a Cool Slush (-10C PWater) Geyser which I tepidize to 10C.  My base (the livable area is one big room as far as temperature is concerned) stays at around 21C without active cooling and little oxygen pumping.  The 2 pumps top left feed only one vent and mainly sends oxygen to atmosuit docks, an Oxylite Refinery and the (inactive) Somnium Synthesizer.

[GuyPerfect]

I've set up a most ill-advised experimental cooling system to chill Oxygen on its way out of the Electrolyzer, as a test of the concept.

One thing I notice is that the very instant the Oxygen leaves the cooling unit, it immediately assumes the temperature of the Gas Pipe it's in, which is around the temperature of the One Big Room™. Can I expect everything to cool down over time?

[Joe Dee]

2 hours ago, GuyPerfect said:

Can I expect everything to cool down over time?

As long as your cooling solution removes more heat than is added to the oxygen, it will cool down. Oxygen has fairly low heat capacity so it will take some time, probably comparable to the time it took to heat up the room.

[GuyPerfect]

I am seeing some temperature reduction in the Gas Pipe leading away from my Electrolyzer system, and it's propagating to adjacent materials as expected. It'll take some time, but I'm confident now that simply cooling the Oxygen produced by an Electrolyzer is a practical means of thermal regulation on the larger scale.

Thanks for the help, everyone! The suggestion to "cool the Oxygen at the source" was the tip I needed.