Cooling without much power?

[Yoma_Nosme]

I haven't read all comments thoroughly so sry if I overlooked. But.

Tldr.

You can also use an ice biome or part of it.

So here's my (starting)strategy. Geyser water uncooled to all consumers that can live with hot water(electrolyzer, toilets, sinks....). I use up (almost) all p-water pools around the start biome just sending it first to a sieve (outside the mainbase, as close to a ice biome as possible and loop it through the ice biome (radiant pipes) back to the base. The water will be clean (the p-water pools are food poison free) and around 10°C (at first- later ~30°C) depending on the length of the radiant pipes. This water goes to the clean cold water tank(base)

The dirty p-water (from base) goes first to the refineries or to an aquatuner as coolant for the At or if full then a tank with a boiler that heats it up till it's ~85°C now it's germ free and goes to the sieve. And to the clean cold water tank.

Since most basewater came from the geyser so it's hot.. duh..so heating it up depending on refinery work time is pretty easy.

When the base can carry it's own weight and and you have cool clean water surplus change the ice biome for an aquatuner. By now the ice has molten and you have a pool of -20°C p-water instead...great spot for an aquatuner. 

For cold air I just use the good old 3pumps 2 electrolyzer and cold p-water (-16°C) (cooled by an At) in the middle build...~ -1°C Oxygen 

 

[Neotuck]

1 hour ago, crypticorb said:

 

You show me a screenshot of a reservoir that has cold air pumped in from the surrounding air and that proves what?

[Djoums]

2 hours ago, Neotuck said:

I don't think that works, from what I've seen reservoirs don't exchange heat from outside sources

See this thread for some infos, reservoirs don't provide insulation.

 

[TOOK14]

5 hours ago, Storm Engineer said:

I started playing again after a long hiatus. So I don't have much power but heat is already a big problem. I'm trying to use Wheezeworts but they just don't seem to be powerful enough, even when I use several in a hydrogen filled room.

So first question: How to optimize wheezeworts for maximum efficiency?

And the second question, what is the best way to cool oxygen from my Electrolyzer and water from the Cool Steam Vent so they keep my base at an ideal temperature (=safely below 30)?

Thanks in advance!

I'll take that as an excuse to share some of my more recent cooling builds. 

First is how I cool geyser water, and yes, first it goes towards O2 production, and oil wells get hot water from the same line.

Spoiler

The pipe thermo sensor lets you get near exact temperature, and the basic thermo sensor is to make sure the AETN doesn't get so cold the pipes freeze.  The airlock is for insulation, FILTER set to 1, BUFFER left at the default 5.  The automation wire going off screen is to a liquid pipe element sensor 20 pipe sections down the cold water output, as a fail safe against a cold water backup.

Next is something I just got around to making, due to frustrations with how slow it is to make steel.  A heat deletion system using the set temperature "exploit" of water sieves/carbon skimmers.

Spoiler

No automation wiring here, and CO2 vent is bottom right at the bottom of the ladder.  The reason for so much stuff is because carbon skimmers only process 1Kg at a time, and sieves 5Kg, so 10 skimmers and 2 sieves for 10Kg/sec processing rate, the max a liquid pipe can handle.  I know there's no CO2 for the skimmers ATM, my slickster farm finally picked up and is starting to outpace my CO2 production, which is no worry, just another thing to fine tune.

 

[crypticorb]

3 hours ago, Neotuck said:

You show me a screenshot of a reservoir that has cold air pumped in from the surrounding air and that proves what?

I probably shouldn't have given it without context, but here's what I did:

That reservoir (and the gas compactor of my own design) were piped in from a natural gas geyser at around 50-100^oC. Over about 100 cycles, and several dormant/active cycles of the vent, the reservoir filled up with hot natural gas. Over that entire period, the single wheezewort brought down the contents of both the reservoir building and the contents of the entire box dropped in temperature.

I'm not currently using natural gas at all for power, so the contents of the reservoir building aren't added to or removed, thus the only logical conclusion is that the pressurized contents and reservoir structure are exchanging thermal energy with the surrounding gas.

Apologies if the gif was too sassy.

3 hours ago, Storm Engineer said:

Alright, there were many ideas here so I have plenty to think about now.

Let me ask another question then: What kind of electricity should I move to from coal?

I have a natural gas near my base, and that should also give me germ-free polluted water as byproduct.

I also have two hot steam vents around me! But I've heard steam turbines are crap right now and don't wort the effort. Is that true?

Coal can keep you alive for a very long time if you sustain a hatch ranch. I prefer normal hatches of stone hatches if you need meat, b/c stone hatches are TOUGH. Stone hatches are great for consuming all types of rock, though.

After coal, natural gas is your go-to power source. It's reliable, and the byproducts are manageable. The only difficult point is you need to buffer the natural gas from your geyser for when times are lean. You can either use a 10+ stack of the gas reservoirs, which is annoying to set up, or use a very easy to use gas compactor which uses minor exploits.

[Neotuck]

29 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

I probably shouldn't have given it without context, but here's what I did:

That reservoir (and the gas compactor of my own design) were piped in from a natural gas geyser at around 50-100^oC. Over about 100 cycles, and several dormant/active cycles of the vent, the reservoir filled up with hot natural gas. Over that entire period, the single wheezewort brought down the contents of both the reservoir building and the contents of the entire box dropped in temperature.

I'm not currently using natural gas at all for power, so the contents of the reservoir building aren't added to or removed, thus the only logical conclusion is that the pressurized contents and reservoir structure are exchanging thermal energy with the surrounding gas.

Apologies if the gif was too sassy.

I just got home and had a chance to test it

You're right it's slow but temperature does change between the contents and surrounding environment of the reservoir 

[TOOK14]

3 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

I just got home and had a chance to test it

You're right it's slow but temperature does change between the contents and surrounding environment of the reservoir 

Good to know, so I don't end up storing liquid chlorine next to liquid water or something.  Might be a good way to amp up thermal mass in some places.

[Neotuck]

31 minutes ago, TOOK14 said:

Good to know, so I don't end up storing liquid chlorine next to liquid water or something.  Might be a good way to amp up thermal mass in some places.

if they are in a vacuum I'm sure you can store them together 

[dallion]

Cool down without cheat or bug in-game mechanism. 

put wheezeworts in your base, not in your industry area, they will cool down your base in a slow rate, reduce uselessly cooling-down such as oxygen to your suit. 

find whether there is a cool slush geyser in your map, -10C pollute water is incredibly useful.

Remove heat by machines.

some of the machines will always produce specify temperature product such as water sieve producer 40C water, 

there are more just like water decomposition, carbon dioxide deleter, etc..

[PhailRaptor]

12 hours ago, Storm Engineer said:

Let me ask another question then: What kind of electricity should I move to from coal?

I have a natural gas near my base, and that should also give me germ-free polluted water as byproduct.

NatGas is a good, reliable source of power, but you have to budget your rate of consumption against the rate at which the Vent produces it.  You must account for the downtime, both during it's Eruption cycle, and for it's Dormancy period.  You will need a Scientist (T2 research job) to learn the Dormancy period, but the Eruption cycle is displayed upon discovery, alongside the Eruption rate.  You will need all 3 of these bits of information to calculate the equivalent per second rate of output.

Here is a great calculator for that.  IIrc, it was one of @R9MX4's friends that created it.  Select the type of object it is, and input the indicated information.  It will put out the actual per second rate, and compare your entry to the total possible range to "rate" it.

https://onical.ga/

Every map is guaranteed at least 1 NatGas Vent, so everyone should build 2ish NatGas Generators.  There's a 50/50 chance for another guaranteed object to be a NatGas as well.  And in my experience generating new maps, NatGas seems to be somewhat common for the bricked over random Geyser/Vent/Volcano objects.

12 hours ago, Storm Engineer said:

I also have two hot steam vents around me! But I've heard steam turbines are crap right now and don't wort the effort. Is that true?

So this is actually 2 questions at once.  Hot Steam Vents are really, really trash tier.  They don't put out anywhere near enough mass, and either put out too much or not enough heat depending on how you might want to use them.  I am always disappointed when I uncover one.

The Steam Turbine has a lot of potential, but it requires a rather specialized build to make it work.  By the point you can actually build one feasibly without the use of Sandbox or debug tools, the amount of power it produces is really not all that impressive.  It stronger use of the machine is actually the amount of heat it deletes from the Steam that it processes.  But again, by the time you can build a working Steam Turbine complex, you should also have access to the Surface, where you can simply bleed off a waste fluid and all the heat it contains.

Don't get me wrong, I want to like the Steam Turbine.  But the current iteration is difficult to justify.  You get more power from Solar Panels (after you amass enough Steel to protect them.....) or more heat deletion from fixed temp output buildings.

[thejams]

On 9/26/2018 at 7:10 PM, Storm Engineer said:

I want to cool the water for internal use (eg hydroponic farms, toilets, sinks etc.) and NOT for the Electrolyzer. The pipe branches off into the Electrolyzer but running 80 degree water to my Bristle Blossom farms is not an option...

Condensation of the steam happens on its own, I have no issue with that. But I have 90+ degree water.

Since Water Sieves do not remove germs, the steam went is my sole source of germ-free clean water.

And as said I don't have much power (still on coal, which is not ideal, but I don't have anything better.) so using aqua-tuners is out of the question.

And by optimizing wheezeworts I meant how to get the most cooling out of them, not where to place them.

I had some packed in a small room with 2k Hydrogen per block but they aren1t doing too well. Someone told me I need to space them out with free blocks around them and use more Hydrogen but I couldn't find proper info on this.

So lets start from the end, a Wheezewort needs to have access to gas at all times and it moves 1kg/s of gas and deletes some heat from it - so you need to surround it with enough gas pressure for it to work non stop, usually 2kg/tile or more.  In Hydrogen it will provide 12 kDTU/s of cooling, in Oxygen this will be only 5 kDTU/s.  This is enough for cooling things like early game power (Hydrogen Generator produces 4 kDTU/s of heat, NGG 10 kDTU/s), or Electrolyzer Oxygen output to 20°C (44 kDTU/s for 888g/s = 4 Wheezeworths in Hydrogen).  BTW DTU = Joule, or DTU/s = W, but lets keep using DTU so we know what we're talking about and not get into the reasons behind it  

You have to bear in mind that when you work with Wheezeworts, the amount of cooling is very low for things with large mass like tiles, buildings and liquids, so if you set up a system, it can take quite a while for everything to cool down, making it seem like the Wheeze is not doing much.  Just give it time, it works!

Even in a completely isolated system, cooling down liquids is rather slow with Wheezeworths.  For example, to cool 1kg/s of water form 40°C to 20°C, you would need 83,5 kDTU/s, so at least 7 Wheezeworts (in Hydrogen).  Cooling it from 120°C steam to 20°C water will take 418 kDTU/s = 35 Wheezeworts worth of cooling.  We are starting to get into the big heat numbers now which gets us to the second part of this rather long post

In ONI there are 2 ways to handle a lot of heat - 1) Move it somewhere else and store it and 2) Delete it.  All of the responses you got so far are using one of these 2 methods.  I will shortly address method 1 - the world has huge amounts of matter where heat can be moved to and stored, but even though this is a humongous amount of heat, it is not sustainable.

Now for method 2) - We already discussed that Wheezeworts delete heat, and so does the AETN.  But as we start to require larger amounts of heat deletion, we need to start using other methods.  We already get deletion when we pump hot water into the Electrolyzer - if we use 90°C water, we are already deleting almost 300 kDTU/s, but there is no cooling to be gained from this as we already start with water (steam) at 120°C, which brings us to the third part of the post: .

We need to move heat before deleting it - If we want sustainable cooling, we need 3 things
1) a sustainable input,
2) ways to move heat to that input,
3) ways to delete that heat.

A great early game example of step 3) heat deletion is the Water Sieve:

1) We can provide a sustainable input of Polluted water - whether its bathrooms, NGGs, CO2 scrubber or Slush geyser, we have ways to generate Polluted water (and filtration medium also, but that is later in the game).  The input can be generated at a fairly low temperature, which is very important for step 2

2) We can move heat to the Polluted water directly by running radiant pipes through what we want to cool down (if there is temperature difference), but we will be much better off by setting up a controlled Aquatuner system to get the maximum cooling possible from it.  The thing is, we want to move as much heat as possible to the medium (Polluted water in this case), before sending it to get deleted.

For example, without an Aquatuner, we can use -10°C slush water to cool down the water output from the Sieve from 40°C to 20°C.  As we can setup close to a 100% efficient system, to get 1kg/s water at 20°C, we would transfer enough heat to get 1kg/s of polluted water to 4°C.  If we send this polluted water to the sieve, we already have a self sustained cooling system, but not much heat is getting deleted.  We can also send the polluted water to condense a geyser which would up the system efficiency by a huge margin and delete a lot more heat.  The downside of something like this is that it relies on having a slush gayser (which is pretty much the end of all heat worries) and we don't have much control and efficiency.

Now consider that a single Aquatuner/Sieve system (using 1200W of power) can be used in a fairly simple setup to achieve almost 100% efficiency while providing a maximum of 585 kBTU/s of cooling.  To refresh the memory, this is equal to 49 Wheezewort and enough to cool down 1.4Kg/s of water from 120°C to 20°C.  The point of such a system would be to transfer as much heat as possible to the polluted water before sending it at 119°C to get deleted by the Sieve, while also maintaining a separate coolant loop at a much lower temperature.  We get a lot better control with the dedicated coolant loop (can run it at any temperature we desire) and we use as little as possible Polluted water with the Sieve, which may be hugely important if we don't have a Slush Geyser.  The screenshots demonstrate how simple this system can be.

Just a short explanation - the input Polluted water comes from the top and runs a closed loop untill it gets heated to about 119°C, the bottom Polluted water loop is the coolant and needs to be primed first by filling the tanks on the left side.  The idea for the coolant loop came from another post which I cant find atm (so drop me a note if you recognize it so I can link)

Wow, I knew this would be long... but... sorry... unfortunately no TLDR

 

[WhatTheDuck]

@thejams

nice explanation, thank you.

 

Just to get the part in the blue circle correct. If you dont need the cooled pwater, it will backup and cool further, but what will prevent your system from freezing?

[thejams]

There is a pipe temp sensor right before the Aquatuner input that turns it off if the input temperature is too low, which prevents freezing (can be set as low as -6°C so the Aquatuner doesn't cool lower than -20°C).  Once the Aquatuner is off, the coolant takes the alternate flow path to bypass it, so it never stops flowing.  Here is the full automation setup.

P.S. Use crude/petroleum in the Aquatuner chamber instead of Polluted water to get slightly more efficiency.

The two reservoirs in the coolant loop serve to ensure that the aquatuner always get full 10kg/s pwater (right one), and that if there is a hold-up somewhere down the line, the excess output from the Aquatuner is looped back (left one).  The idea is to use valves to redirect parts of the coolant flow where it is needed and use temp sensors + shutoff valves to stop coolant flow there once the desired temperature is reached.  This causes the coolant loop to shrink/expand as needed, so the setup ensures it is always running at full capacity.  More details and my inspiration from this:

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 9/26/2018 at 11:09 AM, crypticorb said:

 

You're pumping already cold NG into the reservoir.  The devs have stated (and my experience shows that its true) that reservoirs insulate the contents.

[crypticorb]

1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

You're pumping already cold NG into the reservoir.  The devs have stated (and my experience shows that its true) that reservoirs insulate the contents.

Nope, I'm not pumping into it. That reservoir was filled once, then sat unchanged for 100+ cycles next to the wheezewort. No adding or removing of material from the reservoir, no change to the surroundings. The wheezewort cooled the ambient NG, and hot NG inside the reservoir cooled down over time.

It functions almost exactly like the storage compactors. I did another quick experiment, pumping in 45^oC hydrogen into a reservoir in a -75^oC hydrogen surrounding. After completely disconnecting all outside variables, the contents of the reservoir were dropping by about 0.1^oC every 3 seconds, very steadily.

[KittenIsAGeek]

10 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

It functions almost exactly like the storage compactors. I did another quick experiment, pumping in 45^oC hydrogen into a reservoir in a -75^oC hydrogen surrounding. After completely disconnecting all outside variables, the contents of the reservoir were dropping by about 0.1^oC every 3 seconds, very steadily.

Huh. That's interesting.  I suppose I never tried with a large temperature differential.  That makes sense, however -- the insulating tiles still transmit heat (depending on their materials) if the potential difference is above a certain threshold.  

[Saturnus]

I think the misunderstanding here is that it's insulated but it's not made of abyssalite. So it has all the properties that insulated tiles have.

[crypticorb]

31 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Huh. That's interesting.  I suppose I never tried with a large temperature differential.  That makes sense, however -- the insulating tiles still transmit heat (depending on their materials) if the potential difference is above a certain threshold.  

This seems logical. I don't really have the patience to build a heat transfer formula, but I used hydrogen and wolframite for the gas and reservoir material, with the exact same pressure per tile average for inside the reservoir and outside it. It seems like the heat should have transferred a LOT faster than it did, so it follows that the tanks are insulated, if not perfectly.

It might be an interesting experiment to test if materials makes any significant difference for heat transfer, since a wolframite tank is technically insulated, which is unique.

150kg/(5*3 tiles) = 10kg/tile

 

[mazeking]

All you need to do - isolate a farms and ranches. Stabile temperatures important only there.
Duplication feels great over a wider range of temperatures