Making Steam

[JNapoleon120]

Am I doing something wrong here?  It is taking a long time for my batteries to heat up so I can make steam.  Any tips or thoughts would be helpful.  I tried looking up guides and stuff and they just tell you on what you need.

 

[Maslak]

Some crazy wizard told me that you need to combine water and fire.
Steam op!

[Kasuha]

The game went through a few updates since it was easy to make steam using batteries. It's quite delicate process now and it's easy to fry your batteries before you produce any considerable amounts of steam. Most current designs use tepidizer exploits.

[GrindThisGame]

Using magma at the bottom of the map works really well. If you build a pyramid of gas permeable tiles above the magma (or hot igneous rock) and drip polluted water on it, you'll get a nice flow of steam. It cools above the pyramid and drains down into two collection points where you can pump it out. Maybe you want steam for another reason though? I find my dupes don't like the steam room and burn up in it

[Smartbird]

the heat from battery is too less for steam.

[suicide commando]

The problem is that polluted water only boils at 119 degrees Celsius, as the maximum heat limit you can have on your gear is 125, it's cutting a very fine line there. I've seen a small setup made by brothgar that works reasonably well, using a choline filled room, with a golden thermal heater. The water in the bottom tiles will become steam before the chlorine can heat up far enough to shut the heater off, and as the chlorine circulates, it gets cooled off in the top of the room where it's nice and cold, while the steam cools down into a basin for pure water.

It doesn't produce a whole lot of pure water, but some. For now, I think the best way to get clean water is from steam geysers, and to use up the polluted water in a fertiliser powerplant.

[Sevio]

The fastest way to make steam (save for magma but that is not renewable) is exploiting the tepidizer. You can trick it into making steam by dropping small amounts of water onto it and activating it with a hydro switch at a certain (low enough) pressure. If used at a large scale this will add a lot of heat to your base, (just like a steam geyser) so you need to have ways to deal with that.

You can reduce the amount of heat with a heat exchanger, where incoming polluted water is used to cool the steam coming out of the tepidizer, and the pollued water in turn is preheated so it doesn't need as much heat from the tepidizer to make steam.

You can check my most recent design here:

That design is aimed at being heat neutral but since we can use hot water on just about everything without consequence, the thermo regulator step can be left out to make it much simpler and save a lot of power. If you're going to try building one of these, I definitely recommend experimenting with it in debug mode first since there is some tuning to be done with the hydro switches and valves and the length of the heat exchanger.