How do heating towers compare to boilers?

[Forblaze]

I'm on Gleba and trying to figure out how to deal with power generation.

Heating towers were the tech unlocked here, so I figured they were the way to go. I set up a small factory that's producing rocket fuel and started burning that in the heating towers. The problem is that they go through fuel really quickly since they don't stop burning when at max heat.

The obvious alternative to this would just be to use boilers, which don't have this problem. Since they're both burning the same fuel into the same steam turbine, is there a reason not to just use boilers instead? Or are heat exchangers more efficient at it?

Obviously heat exchangers have the extra utility of burning spoilage, but presumably I want to be using those resources before they spoil.

[GtDRZ]

Yeah, heating towers do say that they have an efficiency bonus, the fuel should be like 4 times more efficient in heating towers.

What you can do to save fuel is set up a very simple circuit condition - connect a wire (green or red) from the heating tower to the inserter that's inserting the fuel, ensure the heating tower reads it's "heat" value into that circuit network, and set up a condition on the inserter to only insert fuel if the heat is around 500 degrees (or if you have some steam storage in tanks, read their content and only insert fuel if they get low). That will make sure the towers don't waste rocket fuel.

Or just ship in a small nuclear reactor setup, that's what i did and it saved me a bunch of headache. doesn't take much to maintain in my game.

[Forblaze]

What you can do to save fuel is set up a very simple circuit condition - connect a wire (green or red) from the heating tower to the inserter that's inserting the fuel, ensure the heating tower reads it's "heat" value into that circuit network, and set up a condition on the inserter to only insert fuel if the heat is around 500 degrees (or if you have some steam storage in tanks, read their content and only insert fuel if they get low). That will make sure the towers don't waste rocket fuel.

Thanks. I didn't even consider I'd be able to use heat as a circuit condition.

[GtDRZ]

I think that's new in 2.0, makes it so much easier to do the same thing with nuclear reactors too. in that case just remember to limit the stack size of the inserters too so you don't need as much storage tanks.

[Daid]

I found that if you use blue inserters and insert rocket fuel, you just need to set a 550 temperture limit and then it all balances you, it can insert multiple rocket fuel, but those burn out before 1k temperure is reached.

Effiency is 250%. Which is quite crazy. 16MW in fuel is 40MW of steam power made.