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Radiant Pipes don't really seem to do much ?


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So I'm running some (possibly incorrect) tests comparing copper radiant pipes vs granite normal pipes (both gas and liquid pipes).

The test consists of a cooled medium (hydrogen or polluted water) at 0 C, through sealed rooms of oxygen at 100 C.  Making 6 switchbacks.

What I'm seeing so far is that the pipes themselves warm up to near 100 C quickly (as would be expected). 

The coolant in the normal pipes doesn't really change temp much more than a couple of degrees (goes in at near 0, finishes all the switchbacks at about 3).

The coolant in the radiant pipes does change temp a lot (goes in at 0, comes out at about 80).

The strange thing is that it hasn't, over 20 cycles, really made much difference in the room itself for either set of pipes.  Less than a degree overall.

The rooms have 1400 g / tile of oxygen in them, and the pipes are filled to capacity with coolant medium.

Now, my tests may be fundamentally flawed in some way, but from what I'm seeing it looks like radiant pipes are very good at transferring heat

between themselves and the medium running through them, but not any more efficient than normal pipes at actually transferring to/from the environment.

Given that they need metal and normal pipes can use the much more abundant granite, I'm not really seeing much good here

????

 

 

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post a screenshot of your system. What are you cooling / what is the rate of heat transfer?

Need to see a little more detail to weigh in on this.

In a system with cyclical or fairly constant cooling draw, you won't actually deliver more cooling by just installing a more conductive pipe. The system just settles at a slightly lower delta T. I suspect your application might just not NEED radiant pipes, more than radiant pipes "aren't doing much". But we can't possibly know without seeing some pictures or a save.

 

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About 24 cycles (which is usually long enough to at least see some visible temp changes in the area), and yes double-thickness abbysilite.

I normally run my base cooling system out of granite liquid pipes using cooled water and it's always worked pretty well

for me.  This test it didn't seem to help much (could be due to the change in thermal conductivity as well, which is why I was testing

before building the cooling loops in my new base). I'm just wondering what other folks have been seeing with radiant pipes.

All of the youtube vids I could find were from early in the preview before the final change to thermals occurred.

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30 minutes ago, Soulwind said:

just wondering what other folks have been seeing with radiant pipes.

They seem to work well for me but I tend to use them with more dedicated heat exchange designs that incorporate liquid bodies and/or metal tile exchangers.

 

If you have cold liquid in a pipe running around your base try putting 2-3 metal floor tiles in the parts you want to cool. Run your coolant through insulated pipes through most of it's length and radiant pipes as it goes through the metal floor tiles. That should give you effective cooling in specific areas you need it. If you want to cool a wider area then you can do tempshifts or larger stretches of metal tiles.

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