ways to make up the water shortfall

[onlineous]

Another way of conserving water is to make sure you don't use fertilizer synthesizers more than absolutely necessary.

If you need the fertilizer: sure, than you have to. However, if you only do it to produce natural gas, realize that you are using a lot of (polluted) water to create that natural gas. It's more water efficient to pump water in an oil well and convert the crude oil to petroleum (and win some natural gas in the process) than to use fertilizer synthesizers purely to create natural gas.

[Asteru]

8 hours ago, TheScaryOne said:

Since you're already aquatuning skip the sieve and save the sand and just heat the PW to Steam and regular Dirt. The conversion deletes a TON of heat, since the heat capacity of the dirt and steam is much lower than the PW, but they come out the same temp. Bonus: renewable dirt.

I've been doing the sieve method as well, and haven't tried a steam method yet. What would it entail to get the temps high enough and cool down the steam. 

[TheScaryOne]

An AETN + Tempshift Plates + Metal Tiles work for condensing steam, or you can use whatever you're pumping through the aquatuner in a reservoir as the heat sink for recondensing steam. Cold falls, so you want it on top of your steam tank.

[Neotuck]

19 minutes ago, Asteru said:

I've been doing the sieve method as well, and haven't tried a steam method yet. What would it entail to get the temps high enough and cool down the steam. 

PW turns to steam and dirt at 125C and the steam condenses to water at 99C. 

While it's true AETN can cool steam it can't run 100% of the time, the steam will heat it up faster than it can cool down.

I prefer using a pair of aqua tuners to cool a reservoir of petroleum and use a conveyor rail with diamonds like a radiator to transfer heat from the steam into the petroleum.  The build might be big but it can run without stopping converting 3000g/s of PW into water

 

[Asteru]

4 minutes ago, TheScaryOne said:

An AETN + Tempshift Plates + Metal Tiles work for condensing steam, or you can use whatever you're pumping through the aquatuner in a reservoir as the heat sink for recondensing steam. Cold falls, so you want it on top of your steam tank.

I messed around in debug before with something i saw on an older brothgar video for converting polluted water to clean water, and never really got that working right. It worked, but seemed to be really inefficient in my implementation of it and just wasnt worth the effort to try in a real game. it was using the space heater to warm up a little bit of polluted water at a time and then when it ht the granite tiles at the top, it would convert the steam to water. Which worked, but then i think the drop bug may have been a factor, cause when adding new polluted water to the change, the space heater would drop temp significantly and then you'd have to wait a while for it to heat up again to convert just a little bit of polluted water. 

I'm still fairly new to the game, so i've been trying all different things that i'm reading about/seeing in order to see what fits my play style and what doesn't, and right now i'm focused on things i can do fairly early (first 2-300 cycles) to deal with problems and stabilize before i go large scale. 

[TrustyFish]

To each their own, but It seems better to just use the sieves. The water comes out at 40 degrees, so heat is easier to manage, and the sand arguably gets upgraded when it turns into polluted dirt, that can be allowed to gas off into polluted oxygen for deodorizers, or used in a compost pile if you want fertilizer.

[onlineous]

In the ranching upgrade it's also possible to use a volcano or a hot steam fumarole as heat source to turn polluted water into steam.