Need help with polluted water, liquid reservoir and automation

[T-Rex_80]

Hello :)

I have clocked around 189 hours in the game but never managed to fly away witht the rocket. It is so much to learn and I am still learning. I have watched several YouTube videos/tutorials and walkthroughs.

At the moment I need some tips and advice about how to set up a water purification plant. What I want to do: since I did not pay attention to clean water it is almost empty (lesson learnt for the next playthrough).

As you can see in the picture I have a reservoir of polluted water. I have built a chamber with clean chlorine though I should have built a liquid lock first. But at the start of the game I did not plan that far (a new lesson learnt). I want to pump the polluted water to the sieve and then into the two liquid reservoirs. I want the water to stay there long enough so the germs vanish before pumping into my main clean water reservoir which was also hooked to liquid shutoff. I have not the materials to build germ sensor. I tried automation but did not do it right. Before: the water was pumped from the sieve to the first liquid reservoir which in turn pumped it to the next. I had two cycle sensor installed to both and both were also hooked to two liquid shutoffs. My plan was to let the second reservoir be full before it pumped it to main reservoir. In the mean time the first one had enough time to kill the germs in it before pumping it to the next reservoir. But this is not working as intended. When germs are killed in the second reservoir it starts pumping the clean water. Bu then the first one start to pump water with germs into the first one.

Do you have any solution?

My main focus in this playthrough has been on decor, clean oxygen, slime lung removal and liquid reservoirs with chlorine. I had success with all of these but the liquid reservoirs.

Thanks in advance :)

[Joe Dee]

I think you have the right idea. The main issue here is to stop a reservoir from pumping out germy water, and since it has no auto input for that, the usual trick is a mechanized airlock under it. When the door is open, the reservoir is non-functional and therefore nothing comes out of it. Also it saves on power for the shut-off.

This also helps with the fact that germy water that's stuck in pipes doesn't get disinfected. So not getting it into the pipes in the first place prevents that.

For reference, here's how I usually do it. The not gates are optional, but make the timer setting easier to understand for me, and allow forcing the door open with a switch when things go wrong. I usually sync the timers to the main bathroom break so the first reservoir empties and turns off just as fresh germy water is produced, and the second reservoir empties before the first starts pumping. In your setup you might tie it to the pump, that should stop some time before the first reservoir opens to make sure all pwater spends enough time in the chlorine room. If you need higher throughput and can't afford pumping breaks you'll need to duplicate the setup since at most you get 50% duty cycle out of it since both reservoirs must not be active at the same time. The lower duty cycle you can set (23% for me) the more safety margin there is.

 

[LadenSwallow]

Another option is to put the output of reservoir 1 as the input to reservoir 2, that output as the input to 3, then 3 as the non-prioritised input of 1 (what you want to clean has priority - but your output goes through this if it can otherwise it leaves this loop). This requires all reservoirs to be filled prior to completing the final step of the loop. When prioritised input goes into reservoir 1, an equal amount will be forced out of reservoir loop.

2 reservoirs might suffice with chlorine and radiation, otherwise 3 is sufficient with just chlorine, provided the reservoirs are full 

[T-Rex_80]

Thanks to everyone for their valuable help and advices  

I got help on Steam with a basic setup:

Overview:

 

Piping:

 

Automation: