A few MJ power questions

[baw179]

Hi,

Firstly, I'm usually an IC2 player but have been experimenting with MJ power recently. I'm struggling to figure out which route to take from where I am atm and also have a few other questions about Forestry 'machines'.

Current MJ set up is a large RC iron tank which is being fed via liquiduct from a water fermenter that I've been feeding my surplus of saps into manually. Currently got about 1500 buckets of biomass in the tank. At the moment I've got a spur liquiduct coming off the fermenter back to the biogas engine that is powering it. I was wondering if there was any advantage to having some biogas engines pulling out of the tank and hooking up some RECs with conduit and then powering the fermenter directly with conduit instead? Any energy/performance gain/loss involved there or am I wasting my time? I guess one possible advantage would be that the fermenter would not draw power from the REC when it has no saps, whereas with the biogas engine it continues to consume its internal storage until it's all gone.

I've also recently set up 2 arboretums for saps for the fermenter and a peat bog, but now I'm beginning to wonder what the purpose of the peat bog is as all I seem to be using the peat for is to power the peat engines on the peat bog! xD Am I missing something about the purpose of this thing as its low 1 MJ/t engines don't seem to be useful for anything. Also, is there a production : performance optimal power input for the arboretums and peat bog? Eg. if I hook up a REC to the peat bog at 50 MJ/t will it run super fast or is it restricted by how fast it can 'make' peat? If so what is the optimal MJ/t input for it and same question for the arboretums?

I was thinking of making a liquid tesseract for my TE machines, arboretums and peat bog, and then sending biomass there from my tank and power them all using biomass, but the furthest arboretum is only 50 blocks away from my tank so then I thought I could use a few biogas engines to charge up an array of RECs next to the tank and then just have conduit running underground from them to all my TE machines and farms instead. What do the experts suggest? (I'm aware of the 25% loss using energy tesseracts and want to avoid that).

Final question: is there an MJ equivalent of an MFSU for storing large amounts of MJ power or do we have to make do with RECs?

Thanks.

 

[silenos]

The peatbog's main purpose is to generate dirt to resupply your treefarm.

The old forestry farms can suck up much power but only require 1MJ/t to operate properly, more power just increases its scanning speed (not an issue) and harvesting speed (only relevant for treefarms to some degree)

REC is the best you can get in terms of MJ storage.

Energy conduits have a flat 5% energy loss no matter the distance.

 

[Neirin]

A single biogas engine can run a fermenter at a good clip and as long as you keep it stocked with things to work on you won't be wasting any power. You could get it going faster by hooking several engines into a conduit, but conduits have a 5% power loss (regardless of distance), so in this case it's probably best to just keep your current setup.

Peat burns for a long time compared to coal, so it's nice for long term, low power setups. A perfect example is farms. All of the old forestry farm machines (arboretum, logger, combine, etc) run just fine on 1 MJ/t. More is pretty unnecessary and more than 3-ish is probably a complete waste unless you only run them periodically. 1 peat bog will produce enough peat to power 10 peat-fired engines. Peat is Forestry's tier 1 fuel, biomass is t2, and biofuel is t3.

If you're going to run your farms from a centralized plant, I suggest you use an REC throttled way down so you don't overpower your farms. Another common setup is to just have 1 peat engine dedicated to each machine and have it filled automatically from the output of your peat farm.