Carbon Lock

[asveron]

I've had problems with water locks letting too much temperature out, and I found the debuf annoying, so I tried using carbon instead. I just connect a vent from my natural gas generator's carbon to the side of the door and it is surprisingly gas tight / well insulated. The net temperature has dropped significantly faster the past 20 or so cycles and no carbon has actually gotten into the room. I'm not 100% sure if no hydrogen is leaking out since I had hydrogen in my base in the first place. Though the gass pressure has been really steady so I would say hardly any hydrogen has escaped. Since doors occasionally destroy gas, it also destroys a bit of free carbon for you. Also, whenever the door is opened the carbon pushes left, so I don't think hydrogen will escape.

(I was afraid carbon would get into the room so I was considering a small cooling pocket below it to liquefy it, but It appears it was not necessary.)

*Edit having played another 100+ cycles with this, I've noticed this setup is almost perfectly gas tight UNLESS your base is flooded with carbon and the carbon inside the base rises a few tiles over the lock. The extra pressure from the gravity of the carbon in your base is enough to push into the hydrogen. I didn't notice I ran out of water to pump into carbon scrubbers.

Otherwise the carbon / hydrogen is really steady since the amount of carbon pressure is always the same due to the setup.

**Edit

after drastically changing the setup of the rest of the base I've noticed that very high pressure oxygen can also remove the locks ability to refill itself and then it'll just be replaced with oxegen, I ended up added another door above just to destroy oxygen so the carbon has a chance to replace itself

[GreatGameDota]

All those weezeworts will delete a lot of hydrogen just btw. Also is this farm for excellent sleet wheat?

[SackMaggie]

chlorine is the best option if you prefer gas lock with temperature control

btw why not change your tiles?

[Masterpintsman]

4 hours ago, SackMaggie said:

btw why not change your tiles?

In case these are already abyssalite ones: changing them to insulated tiles (unless made from abyssalite) would be a downgrade.

[asveron]

8 hours ago, GreatGameDota said:

All those weezeworts will delete a lot of hydrogen just btw. Also is this farm for excellent sleet wheat?

So far I'm only achieving good, I'm not sure I'm going to strive for excellent since the patch in a few weeks remove harvest grades. The way the temperature is dropping it'll definitely reach minimum wheezewort temperature, so maybe its possible to remove a certain amount of wheezeworts to achieve excellent grade but I'm not sure how steady that will be to consistently produce excellent grade. I decided not to use radiators because it seemed funner finding slight alternatives. This setup doesn't take any energy, even the carbon pumping is free since its from the natural gas generator.

Do wheezeworts really? Hmm I've not noticed any hydrogen loss after playing 40+ cycles. I'll try to keep that in mind.

5 hours ago, SackMaggie said:

chlorine is the best option if you prefer gas lock with temperature control

btw why not change your tiles?

Carbon dioxide is a lot more common and can be consistently pumped to the front of the door for free since natural gas generators pumps it for free.  That way whenever the door is opened you can guarantee high carbon dioxide pressure to push into the lock and making it gas tight consistently.

[Whispershade]

Wheezeworts occasionally forget the gasses they contain on save/loads so over time you will lose gas in the room. It can take a number of save loads for it to become noticeable.  But I've definitely encountered it in enclosed rooms. I've now started passing my base's primary hydrogen pipe with vents through wheezewort cooling chambers to automatically keep their pressure up.

I tends to be a bit leery of gas locks, personally, because sometimes something can come along and destabilize pressure and then you have a cascade of failures that is frustrating to address.

It sounds like you have that figured out though, so I hope it works well for you.

[firshpear]

Actually, make two doors in a line, and a gas pumper in the middle which pumps the extra gas out to your room (after making the small room vacuum, it will still works because your dups will produce some little bit CO2 in the vacuum room)

[asveron]

3 hours ago, firshpear said:

Actually, make two doors in a line, and a gas pumper in the middle which pumps the extra gas out to your room (after making the small room vacuum, it will still works because your dups will produce some little bit CO2 in the vacuum room)

 

Hey @firshpear! I'm a little confused by what you mean. Wouldn't you have a vacuum lock instead if the gas pump is constantly pumping between the two doors? I first thought you were implying to make a vacuum lock, but then you also imply that ("after making the small room vacuum, it will still works because your dups will produce some little bit CO2 in the vacuum room)". That small amount of c02 turn into a vacuum because there is a gas pump active.

A vacuum lock does sound pretty neat tho! For a little more energy you have even better insulation! I'll keep it in mind when klei fixes the door-gas-destruction bug that has been claimed to been fixed. Right now a vacuum would cause hydrogen rushing into the middle room and getting destroyed by the doors. The heavy pressure caused by the carbon vent in front of the doors guarantees that carbon rushes to the door and get destroyed rather than the hydrogen.

It sounded a bit like you're implying that you would pump a vacuum then turn if off completely and remain with a small amount of co2 caused by duplicants. That amount of pressure would be extremely unsteady with changes in air density and significant amounts of hydrogen would easily leak out eventually even if it doesn't get destroyed by the doors.

Sorry if I sound critical, I spent a lot of time figuring out and dealing with all the problems that comes with gas locks.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 7/17/2017 at 2:30 AM, asveron said:

I've had problems with water locks letting too much temperature out, and I found the debuf annoying, so I tried using carbon instead. I just connect a vent from my natural gas generator's carbon to the side of the door and it is surprisingly gas tight / well insulated. The net temperature has dropped significantly faster the past 20 or so cycles and no carbon has actually gotten into the room. I'm not 100% sure if no hydrogen is leaking out since I had hydrogen in my base in the first place. Though the gass pressure has been really steady so I would say hardly any hydrogen has escaped. Since doors occasionally destroy gas, it also destroys a bit of free carbon for you. Also, whenever the door is opened the carbon pushes left, so I don't think hydrogen will escape.

I used a different method.  I used the naturally sorting properties of gasses for my cold room.  This one is poorly designed, but I didn't get a screenshot from my previous run.

The doors on the left were an air lock, but hydrogen kept escaping. So I dug out the bottom and put a ladder up into the room.  It works very well.  There's a valve above the vent to let in the hydrogen, but once the room was full, I closed the valve.  I'm on cycle 500-ish and its still producing excellent blossoms.  

This method also works well for pincha pepper plants, but using space heaters instead of wheezeworts.

[asveron]

7 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I used a different method.  I used the naturally sorting properties of gasses for my cold room.  This one is poorly designed, but I didn't get a screenshot from my previous run.

The doors on the left were an air lock, but hydrogen kept escaping. So I dug out the bottom and put a ladder up into the room.  It works very well.  There's a valve above the vent to let in the hydrogen, but once the room was full, I closed the valve.  I'm on cycle 500-ish and its still producing excellent blossoms.  

This method also works well for pincha pepper plants, but using space heaters instead of wheezeworts.

Yeah this is definitely a better design, I started having problems with my lock after 200 or so cycles. By the way do you ever have problems with oxygen pushing even further up into the room after the weezeworts/doors destroy some gas? It seems like if the hydrogen pressure dropped here oxygen would get in. (maybe if some oxygen got in it would be okay anyways). Regardless, I'm probably going to do this to my next game.

[Kasuha]

Hydrogen is one of worse gases to keep your plants in. When you have wheezeworts straight in your farm, the best gas to use is natural gas. When you use radiator cooling, the best gas is chlorine followed by CO2. Each of these is heavy enough to make sufficiently "tight" lock on its own with just the door placed at the top of the room.

[asveron]

 

2 hours ago, Kasuha said:

Hydrogen is one of worse gases to keep your plants in. When you have wheezeworts straight in your farm, the best gas to use is natural gas. When you use radiator cooling, the best gas is chlorine followed by CO2. Each of these is heavy enough to make sufficiently "tight" lock on its own with just the door placed at the top of the room.

That makes a lot of sense.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 7/23/2017 at 0:37 AM, asveron said:

Yeah this is definitely a better design, I started having problems with my lock after 200 or so cycles. By the way do you ever have problems with oxygen pushing even further up into the room after the weezeworts/doors destroy some gas? It seems like if the hydrogen pressure dropped here oxygen would get in. (maybe if some oxygen got in it would be okay anyways). Regardless, I'm probably going to do this to my next game.

I've had problems with my dupes consuming all my oxygen and hydrogen pushing out the bottom, but I haven't had the other way around.  I ended up closing off the bottom with doors and putting in a pump for oxygen.  It adds oxygen to the bottom until the pressure is around 1500g and solved my problem.  Wheezeworts never seem to destroy any of my hydrogen, but I do have a vent at the top with a valve so that if I ever did need to add hydrogen, all I have to do is open the valve.  

[Lifegrow]

On 25/07/2017 at 7:15 AM, KittenIsAGeek said:

I've had problems with my dupes consuming all my oxygen and hydrogen pushing out the bottom, but I haven't had the other way around.  I ended up closing off the bottom with doors and putting in a pump for oxygen.  It adds oxygen to the bottom until the pressure is around 1500g and solved my problem.  Wheezeworts never seem to destroy any of my hydrogen, but I do have a vent at the top with a valve so that if I ever did need to add hydrogen, all I have to do is open the valve.  

Because your vent is over-pressurised, you probably wouldn't notice it was topping up from what was already stored in the valve, without you needing to toggle it.

As @Kasuha has pointed out, the right gas for the job is key  I normally avoid open grow rooms as I like to control exactly what's inside - I cool externally, and maintain with thermal switches, pulling from a separate reservoir.

[KittenIsAGeek]

14 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

Because your vent is over-pressurised, you probably wouldn't notice it was topping up from what was already stored in the valve, without you needing to toggle it.

As @Kasuha has pointed out, the right gas for the job is key  I normally avoid open grow rooms as I like to control exactly what's inside - I cool externally, and maintain with thermal switches, pulling from a separate reservoir.

True.  However, other than the valve for more hydrogen (if necessary), the room is completely passively cooled.  The wheezeworts counteract the plant heat very nicely.  I have considered re-designing with thermal switches, etc., but until I need to put the wheezeworts elsewhere, it will probably remain this way.