Germs in Water

[JacquesRE]

Hello everyone,

 

I'm struggling with polluted water atm. I can't get rid of germs inside of it. Water distiller isn't enough or there is a way that I don't know yet. Someone can give me some advice about it?

[MAD-Kuzia]

Boil it or use it as coolant for metal refinery and then make a fertilizer out of it.

[clickrush]

There are some ways of dealing with germs in water.

First of all some intakes don't care about germs in water. Do you have any machines that take in water or polluted water? The fertilizer for example takes in polluted water and produces natural gas and steam. It won't matter that there are germs inside the water. Just think of any machine that consumes water and produces something useful and you get rid of germs.

If you want to maintain a plumbing/sanitation cycle that cleans water and reuses it then I suggest you look into heating it. Germs will die in clean water at a slow rate, which may take too much time for your purposes. If you heat the water to >50C with a tepidizer, then they start dieing rather quickly. I didn't test out different temperatures, so the efficiency may wary. Be sure you use a temp switch on the tepidizer.

Another method would be boiling water. This alongside the first method is my preferred one. The big plus is that you can get rid of the distiller like this, and directly boil polluted water, which will save you the trouble of making sand in the long run.

Small scale water boiling can be done with a space heater, be sure you watch the videos of the guy who invented this method (from what I know). Here is the video where he tests the method. He has more videos where he tries to scale it and one where he actually uses it in a base (not in debug mode):

 

If you want to have a setup that boils large amounts of (polluted) water but requires more power, then I suggest you use a combination of tepidizers and aquatuners:

Use the tepidizer(s) to preheat the water to about 80C and a couple temp switches to switch them off and switch on the aquatuner(s) from 80-120C.

The good thing about this method is that you can cool down the water with the aquatuner after you boiled it. The issue with this method is that it is only really efficient if you use it for large amounts of water in bursts, as the aquatuner needs a constant intake of water that you want to cool. As an idea you can store hot, clean water from a geyser right below/next to your boiling setup. This way the tepidizer needs to do less work and you can use the aquatuner to cool down this clean water to get it going. Just keep in mind that this setup will produce a surplus of water because you are using a geyser.

So again, my preferred method is to use polluted germ water in the early to midgame for things that don't care about it and then as the game progresses I start to boil it with the aquatuner setup.

[mdallicardillo]

In my limited experience the simplest thing to do with your germ water is just send it through a distiller and then straight to your electrolyzer setup. The only germs that grow in polluted water (at least for now...) are food poisoning germs. Food poisoning dies in clean water AND gasses. Using the distilled polluted water in the electrolyzers produces Oxygen and Hydrogen with germs in it, but by the time you pump it to your base the germs are generally mostly dead, to the point that within a few tiles from the vents they have completely died off.

21 hours ago, clickrush said:

The big plus is that you can get rid of the distiller like this, and directly boil polluted water, which will save you the trouble of making sand in the long run

It was posted somewhere else recently that "the long run" for sand use is something like 800 or 1000 cycles of distilling. People don't LIKE using sand because it is a finite resource, but in MOST players bases, I would guess that it is functionally infinite.

One final thing, if you put your electrolyzers in a cold biome or even just cool your oxygen down once it's made that will also help kill germs.

[Moggles]

I feed my lavatory and sink waste to thimble reeds at the moment. They consume the polluted water and germs destroying them completely. A single hydroponic farm with a thimble reed can easily handle 3 dupes toilet needs for one cycle with quite a short pipe buffer. If you add more dupes you should either increase the piping length, build more bathrooms or add more plants to prevent the system backing up.

Obviously you are also destroying the clean water required to run the bathroom so harnessing a steam geyser is required to make this work in the long term.

[Risu]

51 minutes ago, mdallicardillo said:

It was posted somewhere else recently that "the long run" for sand use is something like 800 or 1000 cycles of distilling. People don't LIKE using sand because it is a finite resource, but in MOST players bases, I would guess that it is functionally infinite.

And that's just the sand readily available in the map. Considering the number of crushable materials in the automation upgrade,
at what point is a finite resource still finite when you can mine out the entire asteroid and at least half of it can turn into sand.

So yeah, you're a hoarder if you refuse to use sand at all.
 

[Q the Platypus]

Also if you can generate over 320 C sand becomes a renewable resource.

[BenVo]

16 hours ago, Moggles said:

Obviously you are also destroying the clean water required to run the bathroom so harnessing a steam geyser is required to make this work in the long term.

Actually, lavatory is adding more PH2O than H2O input. If you build a closed loop with a distiller in, you will find the loop been filled quite soon. An exit for PH2O to reed is needed with a valve to ensure the reed just consume the added PH2O from lavatory. Shower could also be added in. Well, it just feels disgusting.

[zzKratoszz]

On 11/13/2017 at 10:38 AM, Risu said:

And that's just the sand readily available in the map. Considering the number of crushable materials in the automation upgrade,
at what point is a finite resource still finite when you can mine out the entire asteroid and at least half of it can turn into sand.

So yeah, you're a hoarder if you refuse to use sand at all.

I will savior that sand and build a monument out of dead dupes to worship it.

[Pumbo]

Why people dont talk about chroline? Is it possible to use chroline to kill germs in water?
I have been trying do this way because I have much chroline and spend energy to heat isnt a good way, cool they plants and base isnt so easy,
I made a atmosphere of chroline at my water tank, but it doesnt help too much,

[alficles]

11 hours ago, Pumbo said:

Why people dont talk about chroline? Is it possible to use chroline to kill germs in water?
I have been trying do this way because I have much chroline and spend energy to heat isnt a good way, cool they plants and base isnt so easy,
I made a atmosphere of chroline at my water tank, but it doesnt help too much,

I had the same thought when I saw, but it sadly doesn't really work that way. I'm hopeful that they eventually produce a balanced chlorination machine (simple chlorinator is easy, but probably unbalanced), but there isn't one now. You could flood the area above the water with chlorine, but your water will still be germy.

Eventually, I just switched to a "grey water" system. Sinks, showers, and toilets can all use germy water just fine. So I use a closed loop system with an overflow exit on my hygiene systems. This slowly creates a backup of excess grey water, but it's really slow and by the time it builds up enough to fill the ~12 tiles I allot it, I've got enough power and other options to do something about it. Getting germs out of a water supply is really hard, but keeping them separate is somewhat easier.

[Pumbo]

Its really sad! They should had worked on it at gas updated.

31 minutes ago, alficles said:

I had the same thought when I saw, but it sadly doesn't really work that way. I'm hopeful that they eventually produce a balanced chlorination machine (simple chlorinator is easy, but probably unbalanced), but there isn't one now. You could flood the area above the water with chlorine, but your water will still be germy.

Eventually, I just switched to a "grey water" system. Sinks, showers, and toilets can all use germy water just fine. So I use a closed loop system with an overflow exit on my hygiene systems. This slowly creates a backup of excess grey water, but it's really slow and by the time it builds up enough to fill the ~12 tiles I allot it, I've got enough power and other options to do something about it. Getting germs out of a water supply is really hard, but keeping them separate is somewhat easier.

 

[mickaux]

29 minutes ago, alficles said:

Getting germs out of a water supply is really hard

No, it's not. It just requires some energy, for either water tepidizer, or just aquatuner in a small tank, heating water up to 75 degrees. Even if you pump water with, let's say, 4000 germs, they die even quicker in pipes. Just set a thermo switch to 75 degrees and pump germless water into the sieve, if you want to have clean water. Sieve temperature remains fixed at 40 degrees, which should be just fine for all needs.