Water pumps

[Smee]

Greetings,

A pretty fresh newb here. Thank Official-Stuff+ and his Let's Play for netting you a sale, and then another when I convinced a friend to buy too We're both having considerable fun.

A combination of the Wiki, Reddit and the forums, along with the Let's Play - I think I've managed to avoid most newbie issues. However I do still have some question marks surrounding water pumps and maintaining water quantity/temperature in the steam engines.

The wiki suggests 1 pump is strong enough to fill 9 steam engines. And this seems to hold true. I set it all out, and with 6 boilers water was 100, and quantity between 9-10 all along the pipes and line of engines. It holds true so long as all 9 steam engines aren't being used to max. Then the temperature seems to fly down and/or water quantity - adding more boilers/pumps seems to have little effect.

The only way to stabilise seems to be to reduce power demand or adding additional steam engines (and corresponding infrastructure) until the the draw is only about half normal capacity.

Would I be stabbing wildly to suggest that actually 1 pump is only strong enough for about... 4-5 steam engines when used heavily? Or am I misunderstanding some mechanic(s) somewhere? Are over-used steam engines perhaps suddenly sucking up twice the amount of water in a desperate bid to provide more power?

~

And whilst I'm here. I couldn't see anything in Development proposals - is a co-op multiplayer on the cards and is there any ETA on that? At the moment my friend and I are using skype screenshare to view each other's progress, but co-op would be beyond awesome in comparison!

Happy Playing

[Coolthulhu]

You probably don't understand how do pumps and boilers interact or build too long pipelines.
It's common - fluid mechanics aren't the most obvious thing out there.

Pump creates cold water (temperature 15). Boilers then heat up the water that's passing through them. The faster the water flows, the less heat per boiler it will get. Boilers that don't heat up water do not consume fuel, so it's not a waste to have a few extra ones.
Engines consume some of the water that flows to them to create energy. The warmer the water is, the more energy they produce. The more they are used, the more water they consume. Most calculations should be performed with steam engines going at 100% performance for a while to deplete the water.

If you mix boilers and engines, only some of the engines will reach their full potential. Same if you combine hot and cold water. For optimal performance you should have a pump, then all of the boilers in a single line (serialized, not parallel) and then all of the engines (those can be parallelized), so that all the water has to pass all the boilers.
Long pipes decrease water pressure, so avoid having 30+ tiles of pipes. Avoid having any loops - make it a tree structure.

If this doesn't work, then fluid mechanics might have changed between when your tutorial was created and now. 0.9 introduced new fluid mechanics and water flow seems more "viscous" now.

If this doesn't help, post a screenshot of your setup.

[Smee]

Aaah 30+ tiles I don't recall reading before. Maybe that is it. I'll look in to that.

Cheers

EDIT: I did try adding one of the small pumps, expecting that to perhaps 'boost' water pressure after going through. But no - that seems to be more related to oil based fluids I'm assuming.

That might be a nice feature though - to be able to keep water pressure high over longer distances using the pumps!

[SilverWarior]

Water dynamics have been changed a bit in version 0.9.x

First change I noticed is that pumps now pump water which has 15 degrees while in version 0.8.x it had 20 degrees. This would mean that you need more boilers.
In version 0.8.x the best setup was one water pump and 12 boilers for 10 steam engines and water in last engine was at 99 degrees. By adding aditional bouiler you could get that to 100 degrees.

Second change I belive is that water now moves a bit slower in the pipes. So you steam engines might run out of water. I belive you can compensate this with electric pump.

[Smee]

I tried the electric pump last night (between pipes, before boilers)

Flow went from ~9.3 to ~0.5. Perhaps pumps work like boilers and I need a long line to ramp up the speed. Perhaps they should be placed after boilers, or in between steam engines. Much experimentation to be done I guess.

Thanks for the reply.

[BurnHard]

the numbers in the pipes are not representing the "flow", it's more like volume of the liquid stored in that specific tile-segment. If you place a pump the liquid from one side will be transferred to the other side.

[syneris]

The small pump has a speed of 0.5 while the offshore pump has a speed of 1. The steam engine consumes 0.1 fluid per tick. From my testing, a tick coincides with the speed of pumps.

A single offshore pump can maintain 10 steam engines, while a single small pump can only handle 5. You can combine multiple pumps to increase the flow in a single pipeline, but this likely has a max which I assume is 10 offshore pumps combined as a pipe can only hold is 10 units of liquid (mod-able?). Similarly, Small pumps can pull up to 0.5 speed worth of liquid from a pipe.

I also tested the effect of pumps over medium distances, 128 and 256 pipes long. Underground pipes were extremely fast, the clear winner. Various combinations of small pump along the pipeline was still a bit slower at filling a tank than not using them. The only possible advantage is that the line using pumps did not leave substantial amounts of liquid in the pipe when the source was cut off.

If my testing conclusions are accurate, you could combine fluids at the source and run them a good distance underground to be divided by pumps at the destination. This mainly applies to water because I don't know how this fits with crafting recipes (how many ticks per second), but the concept could be applied to all other liquids given high enough production rates. Depending on the mechanics of storage tanks, they might hinder the system instead of being a good buffer,

I didn't test any effect on boiler heat rate though. This might be able to compress the water and increase boiler efficiency, but likely won't make a difference.

[TheSAguy]

Could someone possible post a screenshot and/or save of a optimal 1 pump setup, at full capacity?
I normally do 1 pump to 5 boilers, then 1 engine, 1 boiler, next engine next boiler, all in serial. have about 10 engines in the line. Probably not optimal, but works for me.

Also, I've never used the small pump. What is their optimal usage?

Thanks.

[ssilk]

Could someone possible post a screenshot and/or save of a optimal 1 pump setup, at full capacity?
I normally do 1 pump to 5 boilers, then 1 engine, 1 boiler, next engine next boiler, all in serial. have about 10 engines in the line. Probably not optimal, but works for me.

Hum. 1 boiler, 1 steam engine, 1 boiler, 1 steam engine?

You understand, what Coolthulhu wrote above? The water runs through the boilers, every boiler heats the water a bit, then it come to the steam engine, when it is converted into energy. The water can be heated up to 100 degrees (it's not a real steam engine, it's a hot water engine) and if so, the steam engines have the highest possible output.

So when the water is not warm enough, you need more water, to achieve the same power. More water means, it runs faster through the boilers. The boiler cannot heat it enough, the water gets colder. More water is needed...

Or in other words: all boilers have to be before the steam engines. Not between. There is just no sense of it!

Also, I've never used the small pump. What is their optimal usage?

Me either. I've some ideas. Well, also look above: the pump has half the capacity of the off-shore pump, so you need to make some parallel lines. Or it can be used for limiting the flow... You can fill tanks with the hot water and use it in the night... And more such ideas.

[FreeER]

Or in other words: all boilers have to be before the steam engines. Not between. There is just no sense of it!

Actually, you could do this if you are not able to heat the water enough to pass through all of the steam engines at 100 degrees (as long as all engines are getting 100 degree water you are not wasting power/water), though I can't remember that actually being a problem when there are a sufficient number of boilers in front of the steam engines. Just saying that this isn't entirely nonsensical

[CherryKiss]

I don't think anyone actually mentioned this, but the original poster, Smee's problem was, not enough boilers. Basically you want 1.5 boilers per steam engine. So if you're running one pump, 9 steam engines, you should run that water through 14 boilers before it reaches the steam engines, to get it to maximum temp before it hits the fully running steam engine.

Also, you can use up to two pumps per power setup, but three pumps will pump water faster than the pipes can actually carry it, or so I've been told

The setup I like to use personally is, 2 pumps pumping water to 24 boilers, which send it to 16 steam engines. I've never had a problem with this setup. I do, however, like to convert my power to solar as early as possible in my games and then I turn my steam engines into a backup power....that's a whole nother long explanation of how to set up a back up switch to turn on your semi-retired steam power plants....but well worth learning

Hope you got your power working right, Smee

[Smee]

Thanks all for your replies/discussion. Very useful.

CherryKiss - I think you're correct. I don't recall seeing the 1.5 boilers to engine ratio elsewhere before, might be worth sneaking into the Wiki somewhere.

I edged the line up to 10 boilers last night, and there was an improvement. Squeezing in 14 though will take some rearrangement which I'll do tonight - actually whilst I'm at it will probably just go for the 2:24:16 setup you go by. That sounds interesting.

I can confirm 3+ pumps seems to cause weird things to happen - notably about half the quantity of water in each part of the system. Removing the extra pump brought it back up to the 9.5+ range.

I read on the WIki about the priority system for power putting the Engines before Accumulators, and some process for reversing that. I will look into that more. My engines wouldn't be hammered as much as they are if my accumulators were emptied each night instead! I'm guessing it's some process of creating 2 grids such that the Steam power connects directly to the accumulators only - with everything else in a separate grid?