Why Thermo Aquatuner consumes 1200 watts?

[Technoincubus]

I mean, Thermo Regulator consumes 240w, heater 120w. And Aquatuner a whooping 1200. It requires own natural gas geyser with two natgas generatos to operate. Plus a special environment, like hydrogen room, where aquatuner will be stationed with wheezworts.

Does it have to such a huge power consumption rate?

[Saturnus]

4 minutes ago, Technoincubus said:

I mean, Thermo Regulator consumes 240w, heater 120w. And Aquatuner a whooping 1200. It requires own natural gas geyser with two natgas generatos to operate. Plus a special environment, like hydrogen room, where aquatuner will be stationed with wheezworts.

Does it have to such a huge power consumption rate?

You do know it has 10 times the throughput, right? It cools 10kg/s by 14C compared to a thermoregulator which cools 1kg/s by 14C so the real question could be; why doesn't it consume 2400W? Anyway, unlike a thermoregulator an aquatuner can be submerged, so just stick it at the bottom of a pool of water or oil.

[LeadfootSlim]

To follow Saturnus' comment, the heat from the Aquatuner can be used to boil liquids much more reliably than the Tepidizer, and while making something useful (cold liquids) rather than simply generating heat, of which you have a surplus already.

[Esdot]

I use 3 of em  running at about 10% capacity, to cool about 1kg/s of drinking water (enough for 15dupes). Each only fires up for a second at a time, and then goes idle, and they take turnes since they're spaced out about 8ft each. You can easily have 2 or 3 running in series, on a 1000w line. The key is maintaining back pressure on the pipe, so the machine shuts down between cycles. 

I could probably use a single one, but the delays between them firing up seem to help prevent the wires from overheating, since rather than 3 seconds of continous draw, 3 1-second draws, with a 1second gap in between.

[Technoincubus]

Aquatuners still stay aside from other machinery with their huge power consumption. And they are not that effective in that way, given steam water comes at bout 60 degrees and aquatuners can cool it to 45 at best. So you need two of them working at full power to cool liquids to tolerable condition

[Coolthulhu]

2 hours ago, Technoincubus said:

And they are not that effective in that way, given steam water comes at bout 60 degrees and aquatuners can cool it to 45 at best.

It comes out at 90C and steam at 150C or so. But you don't need to cool geyser water if you cap your steam geyser right and then use the water right.

Aquatuners are still much better at cooling than thermo regulators by pure math. They cool 10 times as much material at once and they can cool polluted water which has something like 2.5 times as much specific heat as hydrogen. So every "tick" of cooling polluted water with an aquatuner moves 25 as much heat as a "tick" of cooling hydrogen with a thermo regulator. Since they cost 5 times as much power, it leaves us with 5 times the efficiency - a clear and obvious win for the aquatuner.

[trukogre]

9 hours ago, Technoincubus said:

Aquatuners still stay aside from other machinery with their huge power consumption. And they are not that effective in that way, given steam water comes at bout 60 degrees and aquatuners can cool it to 45 at best. So you need two of them working at full power to cool liquids to tolerable condition

how do you have 10 kg/s of hot geyser water that you need to cool down?

1.  Most geyser water you should be using hot, as there is no benefit to cooling down geyser water before using it in an electrolyzer, if you're using abyssalite pipes as you should be.

2.  Maps only have at most 2 steam geysers, which combined output less than 10 kg/s of water/steam.  If you're only trying to cool down 1 kg/s of geyser water, than you have capacity to run it through the aquatuner 10 times, which takes it from 90 C down to -50 C, which doesn't actually work because the pipes would break, which shows that the aquatuner has ample capacity to cool down 1 kg/s of geyser water for "drinking water".

3.  Dupes don't drink water, unless I missed that in a recent update.  why are people cooling down drinking water?

[Byste]

I've only found 3 uses for aquatuners.

1, in LOX setups, it works the same way with oil as you would do with a thermo regulator in the setups of yore.

2, as a boiler. You pretty much have to submerge the tuner to prevent it from overheating, you can use that heat to boil polluted water into clean water (or at the least, sterilize it with heat).

3, as a source of cold liquid for base cooling, not food or electrolyzers. Food/electrolyzers doesn't need cold liquid, if you transport liquid in abyssalite pipes it doesn't matter how hot it is. The only upside of sending cold liquid to electrolyzers is you can use it with granite pipes to keep it cool. Not super efficient, but viable if you're short on other methods of cooling.

[PhailRaptor]

To summarize what others have said:

 

The Aquatuner consumes so much electricity because it effectively combines 3 processes into a single device.  It displaces heat from what goes through it, like the Thermal Regulator.  It can be submerged, allowing you to use that displaced heat to sanitize water that has germs in it, in place of a Tepidizer.  And it allows you to reliably boil polluted water, something that cannot be done by any other combination of devices, converting it into Dirt and Steam, instead of using the Water Purifier at the cost of Sand, a limited (or at least, very difficult to fabricate) resource.

[onlineous]

On 11/1/2017 at 7:08 AM, PhailRaptor said:

To summarize what others have said:

 

The Aquatuner consumes so much electricity because it effectively combines 3 processes into a single device.  It displaces heat from what goes through it, like the Thermal Regulator.  It can be submerged, allowing you to use that displaced heat to sanitize water that has germs in it, in place of a Tepidizer.  And it allows you to reliably boil polluted water, something that cannot be done by any other combination of devices, converting it into Dirt and Steam, instead of using the Water Purifier at the cost of Sand, a limited (or at least, very difficult to fabricate) resource.

What is the talk about reliably boiling polluted water and none of the other devices being able to do that? A liquid tepidizer combined with a water clock / pulser / whatever you want to call it works perfectly, way more efficient than an aquatuner (unless you are really able to use all the generated cold, which I really can't, even when using a PO2 - O2 process.) Or is using the tepidizer in a 'non-intended way' to exploity for you folks?

[trukogre]

7 hours ago, onlineous said:

What is the talk about reliably boiling polluted water and none of the other devices being able to do that? A liquid tepidizer combined with a water clock / pulser / whatever you want to call it works perfectly, way more efficient than an aquatuner (unless you are really able to use all the generated cold, which I really can't, even when using a PO2 - O2 process.) Or is using the tepidizer in a 'non-intended way' to exploity for you folks?

You've asked multiple questions here, but we can't answer them, because you're comparing the current "best aquatuner design" to some design you have, that we don't have specifics for.  What throughput do you get with your design?  how much wattage does it use? I can say that I am able to use all the generated cold from an aquatuner, but as to your other questions, *shrug*.

[onlineous]

3 hours ago, trukogre said:

You've asked multiple questions here, but we can't answer them, because you're comparing the current "best aquatuner design" to some design you have, that we don't have specifics for.  What throughput do you get with your design?  how much wattage does it use? I can say that I am able to use all the generated cold from an aquatuner, but as to your other questions, *shrug*.

You have a point. I thought this kind of system was quite common, my bad.

A screenshot and the wiring and plumbing scheme's can be found here:

https://imgur.com/a/a7hX9

I switch on the water pulser on the top using the temperature switch above the tepidizer. When the oil drops below 170 degrees the pulser switches on. The pulser switches the tepidizer on and off, thereby overriding it's maximum temperature setting (I can imagine this setup is too exploity for some).

The hot oil heats the vaporisation chamber just below the oil. Because the chamber is only 1 tile high and always filled with either polluted water or steam it never generates polluted oxygen. T

The steam flows towards the condensation chamber on the left and condenses into clean water.

Below the condensation chamber there is a chamber filled with polluted water. This serves as a heat exchange preheating the polluted water and cooling the clean water. The clean water in turn cools the wolframite bridges, wolframite shower and statue which in turn condense the steam back into water.

The oil chamber is a bit big. This is because I use it to convert all my excess fertilizer (I run fertilizer makers to gain natural gass) into dirt.

I did a crude efficiency test by isolating the system from the rest of my base and running it on battery power only. Assuming there is no energy loss when running from batteries the system showed the following results:

Conversion: 1060 kg of polluted water to clean water
Time: approximately 0.8 cycle
Energy requirement: 241803 joules

I'm not sure using an aquatuner is better or worse. I had the feeling it didn't generate heat quickly enough. If you can use all the generated cold it might be, but I would turn my whole base into one big lump of ice. I wonder if using an aquatuner is more efficient anyway though considering you can get cooling virtually for free using wheezeworts and a nice oil radiator running through your base (below my system, just for fun;) )

https://imgur.com/a/Jvvir
 

[Saturnus]

31 minutes ago, onlineous said:

You have a point. I thought this kind of system was quite common, my bad.

I did a crude efficiency test by isolating the system from the rest of my base and running it on battery power only. Assuming there is no energy loss when running from batteries the system showed the following results:

Conversion: 1060 kg of polluted water to clean water
Time: approximately 0.8 cycle
Energy requirement: 241803 joules

Given that automation beta was released less than 3 days ago it's a stretch to even begin to assume it is common.

Given those numbers above throughput is very low, only 2208g/s where the best aquatuner set up using oil upgrade processed 10000g/s stable. Power efficiency isn't too bad at 228J/kg where the best aquatuner set up using oil upgrade used 256J/kg with 4.5 times the output and much more compact build. However, with automation beta I can probably look into making the 10kg/s distiller more efficient but it's not a very high priority for me.

Remember, the rock crusher can now make pretty much endless sand so boiler set ups are pretty much redundant now.

The 10kg/s aquatuner distiller is here for comparison 

 

[onlineous]

"Given that automation beta was released less than 3 days ago it's a stretch to even begin to assume it is common."

I haven't used automation, this is just the oil upgrade. I assumed these kind of boilers were common.

"Given those numbers above throughput is very low, only 2208g/s where the best aquatuner set up using oil upgrade processed 10000g/s stable. Power efficiency isn't too bad at 228J/kg where the best aquatuner set up using oil upgrade used 256J/kg with 4.5 times the output and much more compact build. However, with automation beta I can probably look into making the 10kg/s distiller more efficient but it's not a very high priority for me."

I haven't thought of that. Actually the condensation room must have lagged behind a bit, because I had my valve on 5000 g/s without any buildup of polluted oxygen. 

"Remember, the rock crusher can now make pretty much endless sand so boiler set ups are pretty much redundant now."

I'm not sure about that. Boilers can be completely automated, I'm not a big fan of having my dupes doing 'extra' work.

"The 10kg/s aquatuner distiller is here for comparison "

I can't open it. It looks good though. The main downside of it might be that it can generate polluted oxygen which has to be pumped out and 'screws up' the system.

[Saturnus]

2 hours ago, onlineous said:

I can't open it. It looks good though. The main downside of it might be that it can generate polluted oxygen which has to be pumped out and 'screws up' the system.

Sorry. I'm logged out of steam now. You should be able to open it.

It has 3 tiles the polluted oxygen can settle in at the top on purpose, and given the steam pressure is about 150kg/tile it will take half a million cycles... yes, really, half a million cycles, before there's any need to vent out the polluted oxygen.

[CantBreathe]

@Saturnus I haven't tested the Upgrade yet, how much is 'pretty much endless' sand?

I figured the Rock Crusher would produce some (60:40) ratio of sand/refined metal equal to the input mass.

Wouldn't generating stockpiles of sand this way deplete all of your raw metal?

 

Lets say an average Iron deposit has ~15 tiles of ~1000Kg Iron Ore. 

I guess the ratio is like 60sand:40metal?

So 15t ore into 9t sand consumed at 60g/s in the distiller. 

150000s or 2500m or 41hrs of disti

(   Answered my own question here... =\   )

[CantBreathe]

Actually I think digging reduces mass by ~50% so 4.5t of sand @ 60g/s.

75000s or 1250m or 20hrs.

75000s @ 600s/cycle  = 125 cycles of water purification

or 

(50% likely worst case error because I don't know the ratio of the rock crusher) 

(75000 * .5 ) @ 600s/cycle =  62.5 cycles of water purification

Not bad for a small amount of metal.

 

 

 

 

 

[trukogre]

1 hour ago, CantBreathe said:

@Saturnus I haven't tested the Upgrade yet, how much is 'pretty much endless' sand?

I figured the Rock Crusher would produce some (60:40) ratio of sand/refined metal equal to the input mass.

Wouldn't generating stockpiles of sand this way deplete all of your raw metal?

 

Lets say an average Iron deposit has ~15 tiles of ~1000Kg Iron Ore. 

I guess the ratio is like 60sand:40metal?

So 15t ore into 9t sand consumed at 60g/s in the distiller. 

150000s or 2500m or 41hrs of disti

(   Answered my own question here... =\   )

metal ore transforms into 50% sand and 50% refined metal, but you can also put minerals like igneous rock or granite into the rock granulator, which transforms into 100% sand, so, yea, pretty much unlimited sand.