Factorio Forums

I was here.

Not so useless reply to a thread that probably was better off dead.



Realistically, I would expect an electric boiler to be 90% efficient or more, simply because your only heat loss is through the exterior insulation.

Like so, such a boiler could be very practical for hot water pumped storage in Factorio. Just set it to 95% efficient so that it can't be used to make a perpetual motion system and have at, allowing people to be creative with their energy systems.

Between the power switch and the pump being able to respond to circuit inputs, such a boiler could be turned on and off easily enough to make it work properly in an energy management solution.


However, I think most players wouldn't really be that interested in using such a thing. It simply isn't needed by the vanilla game, as you already have enough other ways to store energy that are far easier to make use of.

As a mod though this could be amusing, and not too difficult to make. If I get bored enough I might have a go at it, since I was already looking at trying to make a closed-cycle steam system and an electric boiler would have uses as a feedwater heater.

If we had made it to the 4th level of useless replys would we have been trapped there for ever?

I thought it might be an idea to add electric boilers or make the electric furnaces able to input water to create steam for the steam engines. I realize there are solar power but its heavily nerfed and very ratio dependent.

Loewchen wrote: ↑

Fri Dec 21, 2018 12:18 am

Yeah. I understand. *pats shoulder*

Squid3192 wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 20, 2018 10:49 pm

I thought it might be an idea to add electric boilers or make the electric furnaces able to input water to create steam for the steam engines. I realize there are solar power but its heavily nerfed and very ratio dependent.

Ok. Where to begin.

This is mixing two different power sources which do not need to be mixed and you don't gain anything by trying.

The only reason for an electric boiler would be coal liqufraction. So just use a part of that coal to run a boiler. Or use nuke power steam.

Burn hydrogen to make steam and heat, use this heat to make steam more hotter, then use this steam in electric generator turbines and got a lot of energy. To close the loop we are need to make electrical separation of this cold steam to hydrogen and oxygen (water electrolysis), collect the hydrogen and void the oxygen.
Free energy and free oxygen!
Why it doesn't work?

Try this mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Mobius1/electricboiler

do you even physics?

This is one reason why I don't have electric furnaces in Bob's mods.

I got a huge amount of flack when I had a loop where you could electrolyse hydrogen, then burn it to make more electricity than the electrolysis cost. I think you still can, but, not to the extent that it used to be.

so when it comes to an electric boiler, what is the use of it? at best you'd get out the same power as what you put in. The only viable use case I've seen is for coal liquefaction, but, I don't use that anyway.
Some people have said you can use it for power storage (steam in a tank that feeds a turbine/generator when power is low) but, I'd rather just use an accumulator instead.

bobingabout wrote: ↑

Fri Dec 21, 2018 9:20 am

Some people have said you can use it for power storage (steam in a tank that feeds a turbine/generator when power is low) but, I'd rather just use an accumulator instead.

I actually really like the option to store electric energy in steam tanks. I can already do that with burner-boilers and nuclear reactors, so why not electric plants? Solar plants in the real world use molten salt to store energy, so this has some precedent.

Shipping steam around in trains is also a very useful strategy on rail-worlds. I don't think limiting the players' options in how they power their remote outposts is really useful.

TL;DR

I would like to see the addition of electric boilers in the main game, for the purpose of supplying the steam needed for coal liquidation.

What ?

My suggestion is not intended to be used as a boiler for steam engines or any other form of power production. Rather, the purpose of this idea is to have a means of a coal liquidation process that does not require burnable fuel, since by that point in the game it is not uncommon to be completely electric everywhere else. In doing this, perhaps it could also serve as a way to slightly reduce the pollution created by the oil refining process.

To prevent players from trying to use said electric boilers for steam power production(essentially providing "free" power), here are some possible balancing ideas:

-Require the electric boiler to be a high level research item, at the very least requiring coal liquidation to be researched first.

-Have the electric boiler steam be incompatible with steam engines(possibly hard to implement).

-If unable to have incompatible steam, then instead make the electric boilers have a very large power demand of at LEAST 1.8 MW, which would be greater than or equal the power production abilities of the two steam engines the boiler could supply, and thus would either result in no net gain(or a net loss) of power. Einstein's law of the conservation of energy will then remain happy

Why ?

To me, I feel like this addition increases the value of Factorio because it seems to go with the natural progression of technology. As a general trend, you typically move away from burnable fuel as time goes on, gravitating towards electric furnaces and solar. While you could argue that nuclear may be considered a form of "burnable" fuel, I would personally consider it a special case, since nuclear fuel cell is extremely energy dense, and the pollution produced is quite small. Locomotives could also fall into a similar category, but in another post I may be suggesting an electric variant of those as well

Bottom line, I LOVE electricity in the game! I really like the logistical challenge of needing to increase power production as time goes on, and working towards converting as much equipment as possible to electric as I am able to do so. This would simply be one more aspect of that progression of upgrades.

But coal liquefaction dose require 5coal per cycle, making coal fired boilers almost an immediate pick. (Although my favorite would be a lot of steam from intermittently operating reactors)
Not to mention the tons of petrochemiacals CL is producing.

So what's the problem with using nuclear powered steam? If it's an exception anyway, ought it not apply? It can be a logistic hassle and a lot more inefficient than just having coal boilers, but minimizing pollution to the extreme was always costly (like having assemblers at -80% energy usage and 4*Prod 3 which either yields very slow crafting speeds or requires a lot of Eff 3 modules for a maximum speed of 1.4375x).

While it would be neat to also have a different sort of solution for this, I feel like adding a weird steam engine special case or a structure that's used for a single (minor) recipe is unlikely.

Not a bad idea. Would be nice for people doing solar only runs.

-If unable to have incompatible steam, then instead make the electric boilers have a very large power demand of at LEAST 1.8 MW, which would be greater than or equal the power production abilities of the two steam engines the boiler could supply, and thus would either result in no net gain(or a net loss) of power. Einstein's law of the conservation of energy will then remain happy

This should be the goto solution IMHO. As long as the power needed to generate the steam is more than or equal to the power generated from the resulting steam, we are fine.

MEOWMI wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 04, 2020 4:58 pm

So what's the problem with using nuclear powered steam? If it's an exception anyway, ought it not apply? It can be a logistic hassle and a lot more inefficient than just having coal boilers, but minimizing pollution to the extreme was always costly (like having assemblers at -80% energy usage and 4*Prod 3 which either yields very slow crafting speeds or requires a lot of Eff 3 modules for a maximum speed of 1.4375x).

While it would be neat to also have a different sort of solution for this, I feel like adding a weird steam engine special case or a structure that's used for a single (minor) recipe is unlikely.

I suppose you do make a good point, to truly minimize pollution, this is a reasonable approach to the problem. This is also a one-use sort of item, which is a little bit of a downside. Perhaps as time goes on, they will implement more uses for steam, allowing this concept to possible be usable in other areas as well. That said, I still like my idea, since it is something I would personally use in my own game :p I did want to respond to your reply, though, and I thank you for your input!

I'm on board with this idea! My tea and hot dogs are too sooty with coal, and nuked hot dogs aren't my thing.

The main reason to not allow electric boilers is due to the "safe" nature of factory failure. Electric boilers consume energy and can be used to produce energy, but only with some kind of loss penalty. if you were to generate electric energy in an infinite loop, it'd do nothing but drain your energy in a purely wasteful way. It's a very easy mistake to make, and it's probably better to not allow that kind of mistake to begin with.

Is nuclear steam not viable for the coal cracking recipe? Nuclear steam has very little pollution all across the production chain, and even a single reactor produces enough steam to satisfy a monumental amount of cracking recipes.

TL;DR

I would like a boiler that is powered by electricity.

What ?

I would like to have available a boiler that uses electricity instead of burnable fuel.

Why ?

WHY do you think it increases the value of Factorio as a game?
It would allow you to use electricity to make steam for the coal liquification process before you have found oil or have an oil depletion mod and all of your oil patches have been depleted.