What to Use Industrial Saunas For

[EATZYOWAFFLEZ]

I've seen many posts on Reddit and sometimes this forum about using Industrial Saunas as a cooling solution for all of your heat-producing machinery due to the power-saving/producing capabilities. I've made a couple Saunas of my own, each with varying degrees of success.

However, despite the discussion and even my own experience with Saunas, I still have no idea whether/when they are a worthwhile investment compared to standard cooling bricks. So I figured I'd ask here to gauge people's thought on the Industrial Sauna "craze" and see what they use them for.

 

[Gurgel]

You are in the wrong forum. At least I have no idea what you are talking about...

[NeoDeusMachina]

The main advantage is that you save up on power for aquatuners to move heat from your industry to .. a steam box. I guess if you're going to build a steam box anyway, you might as well make it bigger and save up on that cooling power. It really just is a question of efficiency.

On the other hand, there's a lot of issues with producing all your materials in a hot steam box, plastic can melt if your steam temp is too high, so it's a compromise between getting the most power out of the heat and not having issues with your mats. It can be annoying to haul hot steel or hot "anything" in rockets or in your baser, so that might require additional cooling.

Pros and cons, at the end of the day, I don't think there's a no brainer solution here. Power can be an issue early game but not as much late game, so saving up on the aquatuner can quickly become a non-issue.

[JRup]

5 hours ago, EATZYOWAFFLEZ said:

thought on the Industrial Sauna "craze"

My thought exactly. "Craze" is the most fitting word for the industrial sauna.

Let's ponder on this for a while: Unless specified, buildings that produce materials (e.g.: rock crusher, kiln, metal refinery) all output their products at a fixed temperature that's usually below steam's condensation point. These will rob the steam area of much needed heat for any steam turbine to operate and leave you with super heated materials that dupes may end up dumping in your base for some bonus heat near your food farms, for example.

The actual heat produced by these buildings is actually manageable and measures to "harvest" this heat can be done with a vacuum environment and some cooling loops.

The only worthwhile source of heat energy in all this turns out to be from the coolant that comes from the metal refinery after a work errand finishes. There are more than enough known builds for this particular heat source...

T.L.D.R.: In my opinion, an industrial sauna is more work than it's worth. The effort in setting it up offsets any amount of fun to be had with it.

[blakemw]

Industrial saunas are easy to do wrong. Though I'll note, the big YouTubers usually don't do it wrong, their grasp of game mechanics is strong enough, or if they do it wrong they're open about it being a "stupid dupe trick" for entertainment, not a sensible build. But often on reddit players with less knowledge of mechanics do it wrong while thinking it's right.
 

Wrong

The most common thing players do wrong, is building Metal Refineries, Glass Forges, Rock Crushers and Kilns inside the steam chamber. Why is this wrong? Because the cool materials exchange heat with the steam, so say, iron ore is delivered to the Metal Refinery, that iron ore, originally say 30 C, starts heating up and cooling the steam down. Some Iron is produced at 40 C, that iron starts heating up and cooling the steam down. The iron gets turned into steel, which comes out at 40 C, that steel starts heating up and cooling the steam down, that steel then gets exported and cools down, exporting heat from the sauna. Thanks to heat exchange with materials, the player needs to inject a huge amount of heat into the sauna to keep the steam hot enough. Volcanoes work well. But clearly, this was not the idea of building the industrial sauna, the player imagines it's a system for cooling down buildings while generating a little power from the heat, not a system for pointlessly heating up materials.

Another thing which is frankly misguided, is building Natural Gas and Petroleum Generators in the sauna, here the idea, is abusing the fact that generators have Output Temperature = Building Temperature (minimum 40 C), so if you heat up a Petroleum Generator to 200 C the polluted water instantly boils into steam. I'm not saying this is always wrong, but in most cases you're better off just emitting 40 C polluted water. Also the polluted water / steam / CO2 interactions can be tricky to get right without large amounts of mass deletion.

 

Right

Okay then, so that's the wrong. How to actually do it right?

There are two things that should definitely go in a steam chamber: Metal Refinery coolant, and Aquatuners. Literally anything else, very marginal.

But let's say you do want to do the marginal things too, just avoiding the self-defeating things.

Glass Forge output can be run through the steam chamber, I recommend valving it to 1 kg/s so it can be subchilled while still in pipes, then dripping it outside the steam chamber. This isn't that compelling, because there isn't that much thermal mass involved, also I don't make much glass, but it's fine.

Any building that generates heat but consumes and emits nothing is okay: Transformers, Batteries. Extraordinarily marginal, a Smart Battery's heat is good for well less than 1 watt of power.

Hydrogen Generators do consume hydrogen, and that hydrogen while it's inside the Generator will have very fast heat exchange with the Steam, so it only works if the hydrogen is hot, if the hydrogen is cool you may as well cool the Generator with its own feed hydrogen. But if you're getting hot hydrogen from a Hydrogen Vent, it's fine.

Polymer Press with caveats. The petroleum will aggressively exchange heat with the steam while it's inside the Polymer Press. So this works best if the Petroleum is hot, which it often is when it comes out of petroleum boilers. Also, plastic melts into Naphtha at 160 C, so the petroleum can't be allowed to get too hot. Overall this works well if it's a self-cooled Steam Turbine room with a steam temperature of around 130 C, if the petroleum is too hot coming in it can be cooled down to 130 C and avoid plastic melting. It's tricky in a 200 C steam chamber, and the petroleum can sap a lot of heat from the system in being heated up. You also in the long run have to manage steam pressure, as the Polymer Press is adding more steam, does take a long time to be a problem though.

 

Advanced

Let's say you want to do it really right and turn all the heat from buildings into power.

I've never seen it done because no-one is smart enough, or they're smart enough to do something more sensible: the gains are very marginal.

But anyway, what you do, is you have the steam chamber. You don't build Metal Refineries etc in the steam chamber, instead you build them in a vacuum chamber. You then use Conduction Panels to pull heat out of the buildings, and put it into the steam chamber, either with a loop of petroleum, or direct thermal coupling by having the Conduction Panel's panel tile behind the building, while one end pokes into the wall or floor of the steam chamber which should be made of metal or diamond or something. The heat from the buildings thus makes it into the steam while the materials are all thermally isolated by the vacuum, like for Metal Refinery, staying at 40 C.

Another dumb trick, is using a layer of CO2 or Chlorine for thermal isolation. Steam is quite high conductivity, 22x more conductive than Chlorine Gas. With considerable care you can have a layer of chlorine gas which the building's bottom tile sits in, the stuff "inside" a building (solid, liquid, gas) exist in the bottom layer only, so then they'll only be exchanging heat with chlorine gas, not the steam. Meanwhile the rest of the building can exchange heat with the steam. With care, it is possible to make stable layers of dense gas, you form these layers be prefilling the chamber with a small amount of the dense gas, then introducing the light gas at high pressure, it'll press the dense gas down into layers. These layers will break if a liquid ever drips into them, but if you are careful with where the drippy things are dripping, e.g. not into the layers of dense gas, it can be very stable. This kind of Chlorine or CO2 thermal isolation does work, but it's tricky.

Ironically, a "dirty hot industrial brick" filled with CO2 has less problems than one filled with steam, the CO2 does a good job of thermally isolating the debris. But dirty industrial bricks are horrible things which are hard to do right without a lot of mass deletion with CO2 / polluted water / steam interactions.

TL;DR

Just don't. Put Aquatuners in, and Metal Refinery coolant through, a Steam Chamber. Everything else, just cool it with an Aquatuner. But if you want to be dumb in a way which at least isn't self-defeating, read the Advanced section.

[EATZYOWAFFLEZ]

15 hours ago, JRup said:

The only worthwhile source of heat energy in all this turns out to be from the coolant that comes from the metal refinery after a work errand finishes. There are more than enough known builds for this particular heat source...

15 hours ago, blakemw said:

Just don't. Put Aquatuners in, and Metal Refinery coolant through, a Steam Chamber. Everything else, just cool it with an Aquatuner. But if you want to be dumb in a way which at least isn't self-defeating, read the Advanced section.

That's what I was worried about. Makes sense that all the transporting of products would waste heat for most buildings. I probably wouldn't be able to build a brick that manages to overcome those loses (at least not a practical one).

 

15 hours ago, blakemw said:

Another thing which is frankly misguided, is building Natural Gas and Petroleum Generators in the sauna, here the idea, is abusing the fact that generators have Output Temperature = Building Temperature (minimum 40 C), so if you heat up a Petroleum Generator to 200 C the polluted water instantly boils into steam. I'm not saying this is always wrong, but in most cases you're better off just emitting 40 C polluted water. Also the polluted water / steam / CO2 interactions can be tricky to get right without large amounts of mass deletion.

How you would you deal with Nat Gas and Petroleum Gens then? The first idea that comes to my mind for Nat Gas Gens is to put them in a steam room because their CO2 output is vented. Petroleum Gens I've never quite been able to figure out a good system for due to CO2 mixing with steam, but I see many people build "dirty bricks" that double as slickster ranches.

[Saturnus]

On 9/27/2024 at 12:40 AM, EATZYOWAFFLEZ said:

Petroleum Gens I've never quite been able to figure out a good system for due to CO2 mixing with steam, but I see many people build "dirty bricks" that double as slickster ranches.

This build completely avoids the "dirty brick" problems by separating the CO2 from the steam completely and avoiding all mass deletion issues.

Around 170c input petroleum works

Build must be pre-heaedt and temperature clamped to avoid thermal run-away (for example by using radiant pipes on input)

Both CO2 and steam sides must be primed and cannot be allowed to become vacuum

Below the two airflow tiles on the right side there must be an open tile, that is not an airflow or mesh tile, or build can fail. No idea why. It is what it is.

More generators can be stacked on top of eachother.

(Battery only included to serve as load for the generator)

[blakemw]

9 hours ago, EATZYOWAFFLEZ said:

Petroleum Gens I've never quite been able to figure out a good system for due to CO2 mixing with steam, but I see many people build "dirty bricks" that double as slickster ranches.

This depends what your goals are. The main problem with Petroleum Generators is if they are saturated with CO2 they delete massive amounts (about 2/3rds) of the steam, however they don't delete much CO2 at all, the deletion is mostly Polluted Water colliding with Steam, when this happens the game tries to find a tile to merge the Steam into, but if it can't, having tried nothing and being all out of ideas, it just deletes an equal amount of the Steam and pwater and lets the residual of this mutual annhilation (a few grams of pwater) inherit the tile. The CO2 isn't deleted here, it just acts as a barrier stopping the steam from merging into other steam tiles.

So if you don't care about the water, because you have a heap of clean hot water from Geysers and Vents for instance, then the pwater/steam deletion doesn't matter, you still get nearly all of the slickster food.

If you do care about the water, hopefully for a good reason like not having alternative sources of water, then basically run the Petroleum Generator in a "Steam saturated" chamber, this is achieved by using an Atmo Sensor to only turn the Steam Turbines on at a pressure over 20 kg, while removing the CO2 as quickly as possible to lower the CO2 pressure. Steam saturation ensures there's usually a steam tile available to merge newly created steam into when pwater tries to displace it.

If you care about both the CO2 and the steam, I recommend a very particular layout which involves building the Petroleum Generators on an Airflow tile floor, which has a solid floor directly below it, this traps a precisely 1 tile deep layer of CO2, which steam cannot possibly infiltrate, this means there is ALWAYS a place for the game to displace CO2 into when the polluted water drips out of Petroleum Generator. The CO2 is removed out the sides through 1 tile high gaps, which only CO2 can pass through, though you do need to pull it out quickly at the sides to keep CO2 pressure convincingly lower than the 20 kg steam pressure. To create this setup you prime the room with some initial CO2 before firing up the Petroleum Generators.

So here's an example I mocked up in Sandbox:

 

In this case the CO2 sink is Satisfied Slicksters, using a split chamber Critter Condo setup so that Slickster can get their Cozy buff but can spread out in a much larger room most the time to limit Crowding to when too many happen to go in the Condo chamber. This allows more or less unlimited Satisfied Slicksters, and they'll nearly always lay one egg per lifetime.

These Hot Petroleum Generator setups do require regular heat injection unless the petroleum is coming in hot enough to be the heat injection, and here I'm using an Aquatuner. I'm using an unconventional plumbing, which could be described as "Steam Turbine heated Aquatuner", the setup exports water at around 70 C, so 25 C of the output water is used for heating. Of course it's also possible to use alternative plumbing which exports a cold stream of water and a 95 C stream of water.

 

[imazined]

On 9/27/2024 at 9:44 AM, Saturnus said:

More generators can be stacked on top of eachother

Thank you. I ran a 10 cycles test with five stacked generator on dev super speed and didn't had loss in mass. Looks very stable.

Edit one day later:
To start this in survival and keep it running was sadly the complete opposite.

[Saturnus]

Yeah, although you can do it with 5 generators I do not recommend having more than 2 stacked in survival game as it's just an utter chore to get it up and running correctly.

Start by building one in survival, and then when you know the pitfalls, you can stack two and get those running. Then next to that another two stacked.

But wait, 1 + 2 + 2 is 5. Well whaddaya know. goal reached. 

[congorin]

personally for me, industrial sauna is cheap and lazy solution for managing heat. aquatuner is expensive and back then i dont know any other way to solve mid game heat death, like using geyser output to cool my base or factory for example. so, i just slapped my industrial buildings inside airlocked saunas, build a few self cooled steam in case it got hot enough (it wouldnt, kek) and be done with it. now that the heat monsters is firmly isolated, my base wont get too hot so i can keep torturing my dupes by forcing them to farm and eat mealwood byproducts until the day the colony run out of dirt and starved to death. loved it

[myxal]

On 9/27/2024 at 9:44 AM, Saturnus said:

 

Didn't expect to find a "petroleum generator hydra" in the thread. Nice one.