Biofuel boiler still viable? (Mindcrack 8.3.2)
- Thread starter LittleMike
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This is why I recommend starting with fuel. Its not renewable but it deals with the part that drains the renewable element the fastest IE the heatup...
That makes total sense. It can maintain it at full heat, but I don't think it can handle from a cold start up. I think you're right - my best bet is to find a more efficient fuel to heat it, then switch to the biomass to maintain.[DOUBLEPOST=1370815849][/DOUBLEPOST]A bucket of biofuel every 25 seconds means 144/hour. The boiler requires 690 buckets from cold start to full heat in 5 hours +, but it's not a linear scale, right? Definitely sounds like it's not doable on biomass/biofuel alone until it's fully heated. If it was a linear progression, 144/hour is 792 after 5.5 hours, but it takes more up front.....
Yea... alternative fuel source is the way to go
36 buckets is after heatup. Hmm... I have to check Peppe's numbers again. I don't even think 1 fermenter/4 stills can keep up.
*EDIT* Keep up from a cold start, I mean
The boiler has the same heatup curve no matter the fuel used, so wether you used 230 buckets of fuel of 690 buckets of biofuel it will take ~5 hours to heatup either way. Heatup with whatever fuel you have on hand. Just don't try to produce the fuel for the heatup as it is heating up. Heatup from a buffer tank with at least 2/3s of what you need (150+ fuel or 400+ biofuel). * Assumes your system will produce the final third needed by the time the buffer is used up.
A Still at max speed makes a bucket of biofuel every ~85-90 something seconds, so it will make at least 40 buckets an hour. Pretty sure the rate is 1.1 stills per boiler, so if you had 10 stills you could run 11 HP boilers in a perfect world... or maybe more realistically 5 stills to run 5 HP boilers and 1 LP.
Confirm at full heat the 36 tank HP boiler use one bucket of biofuel every 101 seconds, which rounds up pretty close to 36 an hour.
edit:
To cold start a boiler without a buffer of any bio-fuel you would need ~8-9 stills at max speed. Looking at the heat formula it looks like the cold rate is the base fuel rate + up to an additional 8x the rate, so initially it uses 9x the fuel.
The heat up *time* may be the same, but we're talking about fuel consumption. Let me see if I can explain better.
230 buckets of fuel / 5 hours = 46 buckets/hour
690 buckets of biofuel / 5 hours = 138 buckets/hour
That would be a linear progression. But it's NOT a linear progression as far as how it actually works. It uses more fuel at say, the 10 minute mark, than it does at the 4 hour 36 minute mark, correct? So while fuel may be able to do the job (I don't know what the consumption rate is, so I don't know if that's true), biofuel definitely won't do it. The point is that what grydian2 was saying is correct - you need to have a buffer set up first to heat up. There is no way you can produce enough biofuel quick enough to heat a boiler from a cold start, it seems.
not without setting up a large xycraft tank or railcraft tank... You would need to fill a tank with like 500+ buckets of biofuel before the boiler should be started. Now this applies to BC fuel as well. You should store about 150 buckets of the stuff before trying to heat the boiler up. A refinery does not make fuel that quickly.
That's what I was afraid of. So that answers my original question, then. My problem was that I was trying to power a boiler from cold startup on fermenters and stills and that just can't happen. Noted. Thank you guys for all the information. Now I know I just need to have a buffer of about 2/3 the total heatup fuel to start and then I can maintain with a biomass to biofuel setup.
Yep I actually tend to go with solid fuel boilers and use an ender chest next to each boiler (boilers pull from adjacent inventories) and keep the ender chest full of tons of planks of wood coming from a treefarm and sawmill..[DOUBLEPOST=1370818365][/DOUBLEPOST]Also one more tip for the future... The difference between an LP boiler and a HP boiler is that the HP uses twice the fuel and makes twice the steam. However during heatup the HP boiler uses WAY more then twice the fuel to get to max heat. I dont mind using extra space because the LP boilers are for more efficient in the long run.
I actually tend to go with solid fuel boilers and use an ender chest next to each boiler (boilers pull from adjacent inventories) and keep the ender chest full of tons of planks of wood coming from a treefarm and sawmill..[DOUBLEPOST=1370818365][/DOUBLEPOST]Also one more tip for the future... The difference between an LP boiler and a HP boiler is that the HP uses twice the fuel and makes twice the steam. However during heatup the HP boiler uses WAY more then twice the fuel to get to max heat. I dont mind using extra space because the LP boilers are for more efficient in the long run.Yep
I just like all the cool liquids, especially in the big iron tanks
I thought the fuel consumption was a direct 2:1 ratio. I thought that was proven in Omnicron's big boiler thread. Either way, more testing tonight. This time waiting for the tanks to fill before turning on the boiler
I just like all the cool liquids, especially in the big iron tanks
I thought the fuel consumption was a direct 2:1 ratio. I thought that was proven in Omnicron's big boiler thread. Either way, more testing tonight. This time waiting for the tanks to fill before turning on the boiler
At full heat the consumtion ratio is correct.
Heat-up for LP is cheaper since it stops at 500 C. So the up to 8x cold start extra consumptions decreases faster in LP heatup.
You seem to be putting the cart before the horse. Use some other fuel source to power your stills and fermenters, build up a large supply of biofuel, then kick off the HP boiler. As soon as the boiler hits 100c start using MJ produced from the steam to power the stills and fermenters. Biofuel engines are far less efficient than a boiler + industrial steam engines, so you should stop using them as soon as possible.
Also, I found that one Steve's Carts tree farm provides more than enough biofuel for 2 HP boilers. Personally off each farm I run 1 mulch/juice fermenter, 1 mulch/water fermenter, and 1 fertilizer/water fermenter. I also have 13 stills, which is just about right to keep in balance with the fermenters. The wood is also enough for 2 HP boilers as well.
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Also, I found that one Steve's Carts tree farm provides more than enough biofuel for 2 HP boilers. Personally off each farm I run 1 mulch/juice fermenter, 1 mulch/water fermenter, and 1 fertilizer/water fermenter. I also have 13 stills, which is just about right to keep in balance with the fermenters. The wood is also enough for 2 HP boilers as well.
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The rule is "base + base * (8 - 8 * heat%)", so at 0% heat, it'll take eight times the fuel per tick as the same sized boiler would at full heat. Warmup rates tend to be kinda uneven, so you can't just average the fuel consumption over time, but it's reasonable to expect to need hundreds of buckets of banked fuel before warming up a boiler -- and worse, boilers don't provide any heat until they reach 100 degrees Celsius, so there's a lot of time before you get any power from the thing.
Once warmed up, boilers are incredibly efficient, but that can take five hours with a full-size HP boiler. And since you can never turn the boiler off, efficiency drops rather seriously in practice, unless you have massive arrays of energy buffers (either dozens of energy cells or, more practically, Railcraft tanks to store the steam). If you aren't always using up all available power, it's quite common to see only half of the MJ being used. At which point, you might as well just run combustion engines when you need the power.
It should. /For most people/, any large boiler is an incredible waste of both fuel and item resources. While a warmed-up boiler is incredibly efficient, the cost for that efficiency is extreme and you need a huge amount of infrastructure to consume even part of the output. If you don't have a consistent baseline draw in the >40 MJ/t range, arrays of combustion engines are available much earlier (require no Nether components), and have vastly shorter warmup concerns -- and banks of combustion engines can be easily rearranged to match that baseline power consumption.
On the other hand, if you have an infinite fuel loop large enough to power a boiler in the first place, you probably don't really care about efficiency, and we see large boilers become valuable because they're a very simple way to get 100+ MJ/t power.
This isn't quite what I meant. I meant that since boilers have been nerfed (again), the amount of fuel required during the heatup phase is now 20 times higher than it was during the pre-nerf heatup phase (supposedly). Meaning that they're basically pointless for SSP, and in SMP as well unless you plan to run you're server for the next 5 years.
... yeah. Sorry, very stupid mistake.
((For precision, boilers also start at 20 degrees celsius, so in practice it starts at 8.98 times. *smacks self on forehead.))
Tested in Creative using Railcraft 7.2.1.0 shows about a little under 1.5 buckets of fuel per minute during the first five minutes of starting up a 36 HP liquid-fueled boiler, which is more consistent with the older calculations (a little low, actually, but probably within experimental error) than with a 20x multiplier to either normal fuel consumption or to the previous warmup values. I've not tested in any other versions, but the Railcraft changelog describes no other updates to boiler efficiency in a recent timeframe. The other poster may have simply been giving short-hand estimates or remembered numbers.
Well this is only what I have heard. I can't even remember where I read it, meaning its probably complete bullturd, though its bad enough to be believeable.