Factorio Forums

I was building a refinery for making batteries, and accidentally touched a water pipe to a sulfuric acid pipe. It got water in all the pipes (doh).

It would have been a huge pain to delete and rebuild all the pipes, so I figured I could flush them out, which worked but was also a huge pain. I did it by putting a boiler and a steam generator at the far end of each section of pipe and letting it run until there was no more water. I still had to rebuild some chemical plants because some of them still had a little water (like 0.1) stuck at their acid inputs.

It was a really tiny mistake that ended up being a huge pain.

So I'm wondering how you guys deal with this? Do you design your refineries ahead of time with easy access to the ends of pipes just in case? Do you use some other way to flush out incorrect liquids? Do you just delete and rebuild? Or maybe save often so you can just reload if you screw up?

Or are you just really really careful to never make a mistake? It can be tricky, if you're dragging pipe and accidentally touch something.

What's your preferred way to fix refinery pipe screw ups?

You can just drop a Storage Tank down and use a Small Pump to funnel all of the liquid in the pipes into the tank. The pump ensures the liquid won't flow back out of the tank again.

If you have construction bots often the easiest way is to blueprint the polluted section, deconstruct it, and rebuild it.

Before then the easy way is to add a steam engine (no boiler required) and let it consume the liquid. You might still have to tear down and replace some of the polluted pipes or machines though.

Pump + tank is imho the easiest option. Depending on the amount of stuff in the pipe, you might have to remove the tank multiple times though

There is also a PipeManager mod that offers functionality of pipe cleaning.
Haven't tested it yet (fortunately;) ).