Factorio Forums

After about 50 hours of playing Factorio for the first time after buying it (great game by the way, nothing to complain about)
I finished all the research and had an absolute mess of a base with a thousand robots flying at any time.
My power system was made up of about 2K solar panels and 2.3K accumulators.
This worked great, but after this I wanted to see if I could setup a nice steam engine park fueled by solid fuel.
I was planning on having 100 MW of steam power as a demo, but quickly ran into a problem: supplying the boilers with water.
I started off with a single pipe for the mere 160 I placed with a blueprint,
thinking that pipe's wouldn't really have a limit seeing as you could also transport 1 GW of power over what looks like a telephone wire without any problem, but this turned out to not be the case.
After that I had to order the robots to move my solid fuel production down seeing as I didn't plan ahead very far and left only a few spaces in between it and the boilers.
Thinking that one offshore pump could supply 26 boilers, two rows, I went to work and hooked it all up.
But even after having a dedicated pipe for each 26 boilers I could only get 20 MW out of the system versus the 81 MW one would expect.
Only a quarter of the water needed seems to make it, but adding four times the number of pipes would seem dumb and would probably not fix the problem.
The pressure came to mind, but even after adding two electric pumps to each line I didn't manage to improve the situation.
Is there just a maximum length to a pipe after which it doesn't matter what you do, the liquids just don't flow?
To test what the flow was at the end of the line, I just dumped the water in a tank that was attached to the end of the longest pipe in the system, but I fills up with a rate of about 150 per second.

I really don't understand long distance liquid transport and I would like to get some suggestions of how to hook up 100 MW of steam power in a somewhat neat and expandable way.
Thanks in advance for the feedback. And please point out any dumb thinks you see in the screenshot, it is my first time playing Factorio after all, I must a doing some things wrong.

why not get the water from the pond that's right there

The tried and tested ratio for offshore pump to boiler to steam engine is 1:14:10. Anything more than that and you'll find you're not getting enough water to everything.

As you probably know, the ideal ratio for a steam engine setup is 1 pump, 13 (or 14) boilers, and 10 steam engines. Using 13 boilers will run it at 99% efficiency, 14 will run it at 100%. Problem is, as Fish pointed out, you can't just like multiply that by 2 or 3 or whatever and hook it all together. Pipes have a limited throughput so trying to do more hooked together than that ratio will result in problems, like what your experiencing. It is best to just make separate units of that ratio and not hook them together except for of course hooking them all to the same power network with poles.

You can probably get away with hooking more together if you put a holding tank for the hot water after it goes through the boilers and then pump it into the steam engines with a small pump, but that gets more complicated and still probably won't work as well as just doing it normally.

Hope this helps.

A pipe line can handle one pump, 14 boilers, and 10 steam engines no problem. A pipe can BARELY handle 2 pumps, and it quickly loses efficiency down the line.

Just run a pump for every boiler line you have. The lake is RIGHT THERE.

Seems like it is just a simple case of two pipes to each set of 13 boilers instead of the one I was trying. And trying to insert water to the side of a row of boilers also doesn't seem to work.
Well, thanks for the replies everyone and I'm off redesigning this so it has a single pipe for every 13 boilers and still be expandable with a separate place where I get water and where the boilers are.

Assuming that you have 10 steam engines going up each line, i see a few things wrong:

1. electric pumps after the offshores only make things worse. The electric pumps let through 1/3 of the water that an offshore pumps out. and you dont have 3 electrics for each offshore. get rid of the electrics and your system will improve by about 50% (think now you ahve about 2 small pumps per offshore)

2. do not add cold water to the side of the boiler line. frankly i've never tried doing this, but i suspect that the last 2/3 boilers wont be able to heat up the cold water, and your engines are getting less then 100 degree water.

3. you have 16 lines of boilers/engines, so you'll seen 16 offshore pumps to provide the water for them all (again assuming you have 10 steam engines on each line).... after a recount realized that's what you have on the screen shot.

So basicaly what's wrong with your system is the piping, not the working parts. make 16 seperate pipes that go offshore-----pipes (no small pumps) ----- 13 boilers --- pipes --- 10 steam engines
and you will get 99% of you expected output. just remember that once you hook all that up, it'll take a bit of time to get upto full blast cause right now you have cold water in your system that needs to be used up by the steamengines before temp goes up to 99 after you've hooked everything up correctly.
I would strongly recomend adding the 14th boiler to each line. not so much for the 1% gain, but so that your system will recover from cold water floods faster (if your oil runs out for example, the solid fuel will run out and your whole system will be full of cold water).

Also, just so you know, if you replace all the belts and splitters in this sytem from blue to yellow, you will still have more solid fuel on the line than you need. I've got 10 of these lines right now on one yellow belt (and its a coal/solidfuel mix)