Is there an easy way to determine the temperature of liquid or gas in a pipe?

[badimo]

I'm actually surprised this is not a sensor but maybe I'm missing something obvious.

[Supraluminal]

There's no easy way to do this right now, it gets requested in the suggestions forum a lot. Currently the only real option is to dump the pipe contents into a room/pool and check with a thermo sensor, which is inconvenient for many obvious reasons.

[Jigsawn]

You can just hover the cursor over the pipe tile you want and it tells you the contents and its temperature on the pop up box. Or click multiple times on the tile until you have the pipe selected, if it contains a gas/liquid, it's listed at the top of the info box which appears, along with the temperature of the contents.

Like so: 

[badimo]

Thanks Jigsawn.  You are answering my question, but that is not what I meant.  Poor communication in my part.

What I am trying to do is direct water or gas based on temperature, but I guess you have to dump it somewhere.

[Jigsawn]

Ah I see. Yeah you would need a liquid thermal sensor, which doesn't seem to be a thing right now. That's quite surprising as it seems a pretty fundamental thing missing in automation but I am sure they will add it. I guess although it seems like a trivial addition in dev time its not worth doing just yet, you would need to add art assets, rig up the code, test it, even though the basics of how it would work are already in the game.

[Lutzkhie]

this could be helpful, right now you can just put thermo sensor to where the output water is

[chromiumboy]

For individual packets of water or gas you can't. If you want to measure the average temperature of rhe pipe contents you could have a thermal sensor sitting in a 1x2 box of abyssalite with a vent, fill the box with hydrogen and run a heat conductive pipe past the sensor

[Kabrute]

better to put like 10 grams of chlorine or co2 in the box, it change temp instantly

[TheScaryOne]

Check out the "Check-it Box."

 

 

[Yoma_Nosme]

 

There are savegames but I don't think they are the finished ones. But you'll get the idea. I can share the finished oil temp sensor savegame at least later.

I made it work somehow. But not with water because it didn't transfer enough energy so the temp sensor would not switch fast enough.

But it works with oil petrol and p-water but you'll need a small or big gas pump to maintain vacuum so the temp sensor only reads the incoming water. 

I assume you're asking because you'd like to cool water to a save temp before you cool it one last time?

@TheScaryOne

Haha thx

8 hours ago, Kabrute said:

better to put like 10 grams of chlorine or co2 in the box, it change temp instantly

Interesting idea. But the vacuum didn't interfere with temp change since liquid temp was measured. Are you sure gas inside is better?

[Kasuha]

12 hours ago, Kabrute said:

better to put like 10 grams of chlorine or co2 in the box, it change temp instantly

10 grams is too little, the thermo switch has effectively 5 kg and to follow the heat of material in the pipe it has to get some heat transferred to it. 10 grams is way too little to heat up 5 kg of metal. I'd say 5 kg of the medium, preferably liquid at the desired temperature, is about right. And chlorine has way too low thermal conductivity, even as liquid.

1x1 chamber with sedimentary rock (gas) or wolframite (liquid) pipe through it, filled with about 5 kg of suitable, preferably liquid element. The choice of the element is tricky and depends on the temperature, good choices have low thermal capacity and high heat conductivity, liquid phosphorus seems to be the best choice in general but only works at 45+ C. Liquid oxygen for oxygen freezers, clean water for 0-100 C.

Whatever element you use, there will be substantial lag between what is in the pipe and what the temp sensor says.