storage compactor question

[Lutzkhie]

i was thinking, if a storage is underwater which is mostly has cool temperature, will the temperature of the water also affect the items inside the compactor?

[chemie]

yes.  This is how you kill slime lung

[Lutzkhie]

this could be helpful for early game trying to build your colony with a controlled temperature of about 22c, which is the usual temperature of water at the beginning 

[manu_x32]

From what I've seen, temperature changes really slowly for the items in the compactor, but the compactor can change the temp of the water fairly quickly if it has hot stuff like just made plastic in it.

[QuQuasar]

Yes, with high mass and specific heat capacity, water can function as a heatsink. However, there’s a downside to heating up your water: when you pump it around your base, it’s surface area increases significantly and it starts returning any heat you’ve stored in it to the atmosphere through the pipes.

 

There’s two possible responses to this: you prevent the water from emitting it’s heat using abyssalite pipes, or you cool down the water reservoir. I find the best solution is simply to dig out 20t of ice from a frozen biome, put it in a granite compactor, and get cheap cooling for dozens of cycles, at the end of which you get a bonus 20 tiles of clean water added to your reservoir. Repeat as necessary until you can set up a more permanent solution.

[storm6436]

yes, items in the compactor are affected by ambient air and water temps.  Assuming this conforms approximately enough to real-world thermodynamics, the speed of thermal transfer is dictated by the thermal conductivities, heat capacities, and temperatures of the water/gas, the contents of the compactor, and the the compactor itself.   Granite compactors will transfer heat from the environment to/from their contents much faster than sandstone or the rest, so if you're using the compactor to do something like, store ice in a reservoir you're trying to chill, then make the compactor out of granite.   Otherwise, if you're trying to keep the contents at their current temp, abyssalite is your go-to.if you absolutely want no exchange.  Not sure if that prevents items inside exchanging temp, but it should theoretically (if possible) cut the feedback loop between the contents and the environment.