Boiler Questions

[SatanicSanta]

When I start fresh on a Let's Play world I would like to get more into steam energy, and have a few questions about it.
1. Is solid fueled better than liquid fueled?
2. What would the best setup be automationwise?
3. What materials can be used for solid or liquid fueled boilers?
4. Last I remember boilers get put into industrial steam engines, and those make MJ, how would I efficiently turn this into EU, or use straight steam to make EU if at all possible?

Thanks!
Santa

 

[lindyhopfan]

1. Nah, they are both good, just depends what kind of fuel you have more of.
2. One easy, popular option is to make a good sized tree farm (either Steve's Carts or MFR) - this can power either a solid fueled boiler (turn your logs into planks using a bunch of sawmills and dump them in -- if you are using Steve's Carts, you can use the sawdust from the sawmills to make enough charcoal to keep your carts going) or a liquid fueled boiler (make biofuel from saplings) or both.
3. Lots of options, though lava won't work in the liquid fueled boiler.
4. You are looking for the Steam Turbine, from Railcraft ( http://railcraft.wikispaces.com/Steam+Turbine+(Device) ) -- stick it right next to your boiler so you don't have to worry about pipes, and watch it output up to 100 EU/tick

 

[Omicron]

I once made this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/44754370/boilerfuels.png

Probably outdated in a few respects, and potentially missing some materials from newly added mods... but I'm not going to bother with another update for 1.4.7 anymore (I've not even been playing on that version for two months now), and there're no official 1.5.x pack to use as a reference, so you'll just have to make do with this

In general, solid fueled boilers are much more efficient than any other solid fuel consuming energy producer, while the liquid fueled boilers are roughly on par with the competition (the largest boilers ultimately beat them, but for example to have higher efficiency than a combustion engine you need to burn through a small oil well's worth of fuel). So if you happen to have a lot of solid fuel items, building a boiler for them is very rewarding. For liquid boilers, the advantage lies more in the fact that you can switch between different fuel types that would all require different engines/generators, and that they make some fuel types more broadly useful - for example, the various GregTech liquids cannot normally be used to generate MJ, but the steam boiler makes it possible.

 

[LittleGrim]

Automation wise, I use AE alongside a Steve's cart tree farm. Pulls from the cargo distributor/feeds back charcoal, feeds the wood into 2 powered furnace while storing saplings/apples and charcoal in a separate ME system from my main one. Put export buses on the fireboxes and place charcoal in it and set it to full stacks.

The same set-up is running my liquid fueled boilers as well, instead of feeding charcoal into the boiler it feeds saplings and fertilizer into fermenter's, then liquiducst biomass into stills which are then fed directly into my boilers.

Personally I don't bother using engines anymore now that I know about energy bridges and converters. 1 steam consumer will be needed for each high pressure boiler, you can feed 2 low pressures into the same steam consumer.

 

[Ako_the_Builder]

When I start fresh on a Let's Play world I would like to get more into steam energy, and have a few questions about it.
1. Is solid fueled better than liquid fueled?
2. What would the best setup be automationwise?
3. What materials can be used for solid or liquid fueled boilers?
4. Last I remember boilers get put into industrial steam engines, and those make MJ, how would I efficiently turn this into EU, or use straight steam to make EU if at all possible?

Thanks!
Santa

Hi
1. depends on the availability of your fuel source, this useful website lets you see the running costs of the various fuels: http://calculator.towerofawesome.org/
2. Best for me is water from thermal expanison (either a dedicated aqueous accumulator or via tesseract from your water production), liquid via liquiducts or tesseract from railcraft tanks (or xycraft or quantum tank), solids via ME network. For solids a boiler will pull from an adjacent chest so you just need your solid fuel delivered to the chest and dont have to worry about inserting it into the boiler.
3. see the site linked in answer 1
4. You can make eu from steam using steam turbines but they seem like more work than they're worth for me, which is a shame as I'd really like to use them but they really don't seem worth the effort of producing and maintaining them for the amount of eu you get. If you have power converters then a steam consumer/energy bridge can output the steam as mj or eu with the right producer, another thing to consider is using liquid tesseracts to transport steam to use in steam engines away from the boiler location.

 

[Shakie666]

An MFR tree farm can power several 36hp boilers, depending on the size of the farm. You can turn the steam into EU with steam turbines, but to be honest you're better off just using power converters since then you aren't consuming steel for power.

One thing with power converters steam consumers is that there seems to be a limit of the amount of steam they can accept (a low limit as well, only about 100mb/t). This means you'll need to convert the steam into MJ via steam engines, then convert the MJ into EU.

 

[Omicron]

4. You can make eu from steam using steam turbines but they seem like more work than they're worth for me, which is a shame as I'd really like to use them but they really don't seem worth the effort of producing and maintaining them for the amount of eu you get.

No offense, but it doesn't sound like you ever did the math on that... besides, using overPowered Converters as the basis of your value considerations is highly questionable, in my humble opinion

 

[Shakie666]

Did you mean 1000? They are limited by 1000 mb, but you can put more than one on a bridge if you need. However a maxed sized boiler only produces 720 so you will be good until you add more boilers.

Strange, I tried putting the steam consumer right next to the boiler and it only took 100mb/t. I assumed it was a glitch since you can't do much with such a pitiful amount of steam.

 

[LittleGrim]

Bevo that is a brilliant method! I am going to do that to my boilers tomorrow.

 

[SatanicSanta]

Guys just so you know, I typically use IC more than TE and BC so I would like to have a dedicated EU system. I'm probably going to use Akos idea with steam turbines

 

[Ako_the_Builder]

No offense, but it doesn't sound like you ever did the math on that... besides, using overPowered Converters as the basis of your value considerations is highly questionable, in my humble opinion

I've found statements that start with "no offence" generally imply offence should be taken, so please forgive me if my reply is a little defensive

Of course my previous post was just my opinion, which I thought was clear but never mind. I have always liked the idea of steam turbines but the steel cost in construction, the steel cost for ongoing maintenance and the need for many units to get a reasonable eu output (on top of the boiler construction and running cost) has made them something I've never bothered to try because the juice doesn't seem worth the squeeze, imo. 2 dedicated 36hp boilers and 6 steam turbines to get hv eu output right? That being said it is the ongoing maintenance cost that is the deal breaker though, its the stick that breaks the camel's back.

Regarding power converters I never said one way or the other how I feel about their use or balance, I just answered SS's question which was what converts steam to eu, I felt the turbines required more info because of their extra costs.

If you're interested it turns out I do like power converters for steam>mj as I like that they're more compact than 18 industrial steam engines, they're also a way lot cheaper but it is the compactness that is the factor here for me (I'd be fine with it if a converter setup had similar resource cost as 18 industrial steam engines0 and of course the steam input>mj output is exactly the same 720mb>144mj. I don't generally use converters for steam>eu, although I have done on a couple of occasions; when I first tried the power converters mod and to make a couple of titanium ingots because wanting a buildcraft quarry forced me to use ic2 (and an unnamed addon) which I felt was a little unreasonable at the time.

 

[YX33A]

Railcraft buffed the steam turbines in later versions. It's 200eu/t. And for gods sake, steel is just as easy to get as iron and coal(both of which can be easily farmed, iron from zombies, coal from wither skeletons).
And while I agree that it's somewhat unreasonable to need titanium to make a BC quarry, that's only because titanium is second only to Iridium in my books as the hardest GT material to get in mass. Also because I find it stupid that the only way to get titanium is as a byproduct of one ore which strictly speaking is only useful for getting titanium.

 

[SatanicSanta]

Who really cares how expensive something is? I sure as hell don't, as long as it looks cool, and is fun to make I'm okay.

 

[YX33A]

Who really cares how expensive something is? I sure as hell don't, as long as it looks cool, and is fun to make I'm okay.

You ever used Steam Nuclear Reactors in IC2? Personally I like them. Bit unrealistic in of that you don't supply water yet it outputs steam, but I find them quite fun. They do of course screw over my Porta-Pack Thorium LV Reactor, so I don't actually use it.