Factorio Forums

Hi !

Anyone knows how many 0.15 boilers are needed to fully saturate a pipe with steam ?

Trying to make steam pipes with 20 boilers each.

I don't know about the limits with steam, but you can use 20 boilers with a single offshore pump and you can string them in a line with the steam output in a long pipe along the side and then run that steam to a straight line of 40 engines and the steam makes it all the way to the end just fine.

Yes, I know about that, but the thing is, can I just use more boilers in one end ?

I'm quite curious to see if I can centralize steam for liquefaction and energy without going nuclear. I haven't done any amount of serious testing, and wanted to check if anyone here knew more than me about pipe fluids now, or any short of ratio.

Oh well. As soon as I find the answer, I'll edit the post for future reference.

There are threads about pipe performance and throughput. Look for pipes and barrels in topic names (as belting barrels is the only alternative to pipes).

A single boiler converts 60 water to steam per second, for 20 boilers that's 1200. Not sure what pipe actual performance is - I usually never put more than a single offshore pump per pipe, but it may actually be higher.

Akato wrote:Yes, I know about that, but the thing is, can I just use more boilers in one end ?

I'm quite curious to see if I can centralize steam for liquefaction and energy without going nuclear. I haven't done any amount of serious testing, and wanted to check if anyone here knew more than me about pipe fluids now, or any short of ratio.

Oh well. As soon as I find the answer, I'll edit the post for future reference.

From my testing: one water pipe is not enough to supply 24 boilers, even using small pumps - the last 4-5 get little-no water to boil. Adding an extra offshore pump did not help at all - max pipe flow limit appears to be 1200/sec. With only 20 boilers they were all fed happily via a single pipe from a nearby water pump at max power output.
Steam engines use up to 30 units/sec each, which is 1200 steam/sec. The 1:20:40 ratio is correct for a single pipeline.

I recommend building dedicated lines for each set of boilers & engines, each fed separately from their own water pump, with no cross-connections between rows. Due to the slightly odd fluid flow the order you lay pipes, pumps, tanks, boilers & steam engines matters: lay them manually from source to destination, if you require the maximum throughput.

If you want a steam storage area, you can use a small pump after the 20 boilers directly into your storage tank[s], then use a small pump to push one pipes worth out of the other side into 40 engines, or wherever you like. With 8 rows of boilers via 8 small pumps into the tanks, and 8 pushing out of the tanks on the other side you should get full throughput [but I have not tested that setup myself to confirm].

Killcreek2 wrote:

Akato wrote:Yes, I know about that, but the thing is, can I just use more boilers in one end ?

I'm quite curious to see if I can centralize steam for liquefaction and energy without going nuclear. I haven't done any amount of serious testing, and wanted to check if anyone here knew more than me about pipe fluids now, or any short of ratio.

Oh well. As soon as I find the answer, I'll edit the post for future reference.

From my testing: one water pipe is not enough to supply 24 boilers, even using small pumps - the last 4-5 get little-no water to boil. Adding an extra offshore pump did not help at all - max pipe flow limit appears to be 1200/sec. With only 20 boilers they were all fed happily via a single pipe from a nearby water pump at max power output.
Steam engines use up to 30 units/sec each, which is 1200 steam/sec. The 1:20:40 ratio is correct for a single pipeline.

I recommend building dedicated lines for each set of boilers & engines, each fed separately from their own water pump, with no cross-connections between rows. Due to the slightly odd fluid flow the order you lay pipes, pumps, tanks, boilers & steam engines matters: lay them manually from source to destination, if you require the maximum throughput.

If you want a steam storage area, you can use a small pump after the 20 boilers directly into your storage tank[s], then use a small pump to push one pipes worth out of the other side into 40 engines, or wherever you like. With 8 rows of boilers via 8 small pumps into the tanks, and 8 pushing out of the tanks on the other side you should get full throughput [but I have not tested that setup myself to confirm].

Hmm, thanks for the hindsight. I will test if you can combine the flow of more boilers, for example, 1:20, another 1:20, and then merge those two steam outputs, and see how many steam engines can I run off of that. Knowing that the ratio holds true for 1:20:40, if I add another separate steam system to the same pipe, and then feed n1 engines should let me calculate how much steam can actually circulate on a single pipe whenever I detect a dip in the performance. Thanks to everyone !