Efficient biofuel usage- boiler or engines?

[Katrinya]

So I'm reaching that middle point in the game at which you can upgrade your power generation, and I feel kind of overwhelmed with options. I started out with some (TE) steam engines powering my thermal expansion machines, and I'm still using TE for ore processing, so my primary power method will need to produce Buildcraft MJs. My first upgrade was a boiler which ran off coal coke, peat, and whatever else I had lying around to power commercial steam engines from Railcraft. Then I built a lava transport system from the Nether and switched all basic ore processing to magmatic engines (and set up some geothermal generators for IC2 power, incidentally). Everything that isn't a pulverizer or a furnace is still running off the boiler, though (assembly table, thermionic fabricator etc). Meanwhile, I've added redstone energy cubes from TE to the boiler, so that the power isn't wasted when none of the machines are running.

Now, I'd like to add biogas/biofuel to the mix and I'm trying to figure out what my best options are. I could just make my usual setup and hook up some biogas engines to a redstone energy cube, which is relatively easy and cheap to accomplish. Or I could convert the biogas into biofuel and start using that to power my boiler, so that my poor boiler never becomes obsolete. Or I could just pump the biofuel into plain Buildcraft engines, hook em up to a redstone cube, and power my machines that way.

Any idea what the most efficient use of my biogas/biofuel would be? I like the idea of pumping biofuel into the boiler, but if I get fewer MJ out of that than a simple engine setup... well, that would be kinda dumb, now, wouldn't it?

 

[nevakanezah]

If i'm not mistaken, a boiler's the most efficient MJ production you can get, but i wouldnt go quoting that.

 

[Peppe]

Boilers are the most efficient way to produce MJs.

The numbers in the current patch are:
biofuel could burn for 200k MJ in a combustion engine
or
290k MJ in a full size boiler (36 tanks).

Breakeven point is at 18 tanks. Boiler will be a little more efficient (209K) than the combustion engine.

Similar thing is true for the solid fuels as well. You can get ~3-4k MJ out of peat/coal/charcoal etc or 14K+ MJs burned in a hot 36 tank boiler.

Forestry's renewable fuels make for good boiler fuel since once you start a boiler you don't want to ever have to shut it down.


You can use part of the MJs to make lava using magma crucibles to burn in geothermal or gregtech thermal generators and have all the renewable EU and MJ power you will likely need.

 

[nevakanezah]

I need a good setup to start and fuel a boiler, actually. The only thing i've had around is my thousands of scrapboxes from a rather ambitious quarry, but it burns through six stacks of them to hit boiling temperature, and still chews through them at nearly the same rate. Do i just need to get it to the max temp, or should i be doing it differently?

 

[AliasXNeo]

I did a biofuel boiler in this video. Probably not the best, but it works.

 

[noah_wolfe]

Any idea what the most efficient use of my biogas/biofuel would be?

Biofuel in a 36LP/HP boiler, by far. If your fuel production can keep up with the HP, there's 144MJ/t that can be used for just about anything, including EU conversion.

 

[Peppe]

I think someone said it takes about 18 recyclers to keep the largest HP boiler going with a little scrap to spare.

I believe that is technically the cheapest way to run the 36 tank boiler.

To me the simplest and probably fewest number of machines is methane from a rubber tree farm + 1-2 industrial centrifuges. Use a liquid transposer to keep the cells and use some tanks to create a startup buffer. A hot 36 tank HP boiler will use a cell about every 57 seconds and each centrifuge makes 4 cells every 250 seconds. 2 centrifuges will make enough fuel for 1 36 tank HP boiler with a lot to spare -- you can use the spare in a gregtech gas turbines.

Or a 27 tank HP boiler will run almost perfectly off one centrifuge (a little methane to spare).

 

[BanzaiBlitz]

I think someone said it takes about 18 recyclers to keep the largest HP boiler going with a little scrap to spare.

I believe that is technically the cheapest way to run the 36 tank boiler.

To me the simplest and probably fewest number of machines is methane from a rubber tree farm + 1-2 industrial centrifuges. Use a liquid transposer to keep the cells and use some tanks to create a startup buffer. A hot 36 tank HP boiler will use a cell about every 57 seconds and each centrifuge makes 4 cells every 250 seconds. 2 centrifuges will make enough fuel for 1 36 tank HP boiler with a lot to spare -- you can use the spare in a gregtech gas turbines.

Or a 27 tank HP boiler will run almost perfectly off one centrifuge (a little methane to spare).

One of the many things I will need to do...

 

[Katrinya]

To me the simplest and probably fewest number of machines is methane from a rubber tree farm + 1-2 industrial centrifuges. Use a liquid transposer to keep the cells and use some tanks to create a startup buffer. A hot 36 tank HP boiler will use a cell about every 57 seconds and each centrifuge makes 4 cells every 250 seconds. 2 centrifuges will make enough fuel for 1 36 tank HP boiler with a lot to spare -- you can use the spare in a gregtech gas turbines.

I'm afraid I'm not using Gregtech, so I didn't even understand most of that. (Methane?)

Boilers are the most efficient way to produce MJs.
The numbers in the current patch are: biofuel could burn for 200k MJ in a combustion engine or 290k MJ in a full size boiler (36 tanks).
Breakeven point is at 18 tanks. Boiler will be a little more efficient (209K) than the combustion engine.
Similar thing is true for the solid fuels as well. You can get ~3-4k MJ out of peat/coal/charcoal etc or 14K+ MJs burned in a hot 36 tank boiler.

Thanks for those figures, that was very helpful! Most people seem to agree that biofuel in the boiler is the Gregtech-free way to go, so I'll definitely give that setup a whirl. My 3x3 boiler can be expanded easily enough, and maybe I'll even go HP to give myself that little extra boost. *bliss*

 

[whythisname]

Since we're talking boilers and power generation here, how about a Peat powered boiler? Is that viable at all? Or is liquid fuel so superior it's not even worth making solid fuel boilers?

 

[TruculentMC]

By the way, the math for boilers is all on the RC wiki: http://railcraft.wikispaces.com/Steam+Boiler+(Device)
To see how long a fuel will burn, just use the formula there: Base Fuel Usage Per Tick (base) = ( (6.4 - numTanks * 0.08) / ( 16 LP or 8 HP ) ) * numTanks
You will need to know the value of your fuel (check tooltip ingame, 'Railcraft heat'), and the size/type of your boiler. If you have a 36 HP (a high pressure boiler with 36 tanks) then it uses at maximum heat :
Fuel Usage per Tick = ((6.4-36*.08)/8)*36 = 15.84 fuel unit used per tick

Now consider a piece of coal coke has 6400 heat, and so it will last for 6400/15.84 = 404 ticks. (20 ticks per second, ignoring lag)
A boiler produces steam to power engines producing 144 MJ per tick, so just multiply how long the fuel lasts in ticks by 144 MJ ( = 404*144) and you see that 1 piece of coal coke will provide a bit over 58K MJ.
Forestry Bio-Fuel is valued at 32000 heat units, which mean it will produce 32000/15.84*144 or around 290K MJ, exactly as Peppe says.

Keep in mind this is for a fully heated boiler! A cold boiler will burn through fuel around 9x as fast.

 

[netmc]

I've used a 27 HP peat powered boiler before the nerf, and it did take quite a bit of peat to get going. At max heat, I used between 1-2 peat farms worth to keep it going. Now it would probably take around 3 to keep running. Pre-nerf, I was running 6 peat bogs to slowly raise the heat level. I had only started it with about 20 stacks of peat before I started up the boiler, and had to supplement it with coal and coal coke. I would recommend having 60-70 stacks of peat now before I even turned it on. The good news is that with RP in the mix now, it's a lot easier to automate and you can stack the peat farms nicely. Did I mention that peat farms are cheap?

Peat farms need to be fed from the bottom with RP tubes. To stack tightly, you can't use regulators (they require two spaces), but you can use a sorting machine and painted tubes to put the peat in the farms. Just have the sorter pull from the chest full of bog earth, and have it go sequentially.. Should work fine. 8 goes to the first color, then 8 to the next... all the way down the line until you get to the end. It's possible to do this without a sorter and just use tubes, but your tube piping needs to be exact. It's a bit tricky and takes more space and tubes for the job, but saves the cost of the sorter, and you don't need bluetricity.

 

[TruculentMC]

I think someone said it takes about 18 recyclers to keep the largest HP boiler going with a little scrap to spare.

That would be me
Scrap-fired boiler math:
A recycler has a 12.5% chance of producing scrap and a 45 tick cycle time, so it will produce 1 scrap on average every 45*8 = 360 ticks
Scrap provides 350 heat and so is consumed in 350/15.84 = 22 ticks by the boiler.
This means that 360/22 = 16.4 recyclers are needed, rounded up to 17.

So it turns 17 EU/t into 144 MJ/t , I think it's one of the best conversion rates from EU to MJ, though I may have a better design coming soon...

 

[Peppe]

I'm afraid I'm not using Gregtech, so I didn't even understand most of that. (Methane?)

Thanks for those figures, that was very helpful! Most people seem to agree that biofuel in the boiler is the Gregtech-free way to go, so I'll definitely give that setup a whirl. My 3x3 boiler can be expanded easily enough, and maybe I'll even go HP to give myself that little extra boost. *bliss*

Yes, sorry methane is gregtech.

Peat is a nice fuel and pretty easy to automate. Not sure what the red power method above is, but regular pipes can work with the farm piece on any side. The harvester/Turbory just has one output and can harvest peat from 3 farms if you stack the farms.

One nice thing about the solid fueled boiler is it will automatically pull any fuel it can use from adjacent chests (chests touching the solid fuel boiler).

 

[whythisname]

Cool, yeah I tried running a boiler with peat, but because I've never used boilers before I tried running it from ~8 stacks of Peat I saved up. Needless to say that failed miserably xD

I also had Peat bogs stacked though and I noticed that the bottom ones weren't replacing dirt with Bog Earth anymore. I'm going to do some experimenting to see if stacking with some space in between the farms is an option, but I'm kinda afraid the 15x10x15 area noted on the wiki means it needs 9 blocks of clearance above it (which would also mean that you need more Turbaries because those only harvest a 6 high area according to the wiki).

I'm not sure if it's worth to try and keep the boiler running atm, but I think I'll just leave it as it is. At least I can get some MJs of the steam it already has, which should keep my farms running until I can get the peat farms operational again.

 

[MilConDoin]

I also had Peat bogs stacked though and I noticed that the bottom ones weren't replacing dirt with Bog Earth anymore. I'm going to do some experimenting to see if stacking with some space in between the farms is an option, but I'm kinda afraid the 15x10x15 area noted on the wiki means it needs 9 blocks of clearance above it (which would also mean that you need more Turbaries because those only harvest a 6 high area according to the wiki).

Did your lower peat bog lose energy at some point? if it ever gets to zero energy, it will stop working forever. At least that was my experience with stacked bogs. It seemed, as if it wanted to restart the clearing, but failed at that (only the water sources disappeared).

 

[whythisname]

hmmm that could be, I've got them hooked up to a Redstone Energy Cell and I did turn that down a few times to conserve energy. Increasing energy afterwards didn't help either, which made me think it had to do with stacking them.

I did replace the bottom one and it cleared the dirt that had formed in the mean time, but it didn't clear any Bog Earth from the other farms. It didn't start placing Bog Earth though...

I'm going to do some tests to see what it does though, if every time the power is lowered or disrupted it breaks I might just use unstacked farms just because I don't feel like replacing the machines and clearing out the dirt/bog earth every time one of them stops working... I thought about using other machines to the job of the Peat Bog, but it's so cheap even if you can't stack them it's probably the cheapest option.

 

[Tylor]

In latest patches lava in boiler was nerfed to figurative hell. So, lava=magmatic engine, everything else=boiler.

 

[whythisname]

Well I placed a Peat Bog underground in a test world and this is what I've observed so far:

It clears out a 15x15 area 6 high (with the bottom layer being Bog Earth, so it has 5 air blocks above the Bog Earth). I powered the Peat Bog with a Peat engine with a stack of Peat, so it never lost power during this test. I also replaced some Bog Earth with Dirt to test and make sure the Peat Bog was working properly, and it was.
I then placed a second Peat Bog on top, it also cleared a 6 high area (so it removed 1 layer because the other 5 were already cleared by the first Peat Bog). After it placed its Bog Earth I replaced Bog Earth with Dirt on both layers of Bog Earth. The Dirt on the top got replaced with Bog Earth, the Bog Earth on the bottom never got replaced.

Both Peat Bogs had their own engine, so they never lost power or have to share any of it. So I'm pretty sure stacking Peat Bogs isn't possible anymore.

I'm going to do 3 more tests, 1 to see how large the range of the Turbary really is (in terms of height at least). 1 To see if leaving 1-2 blocks of space between Peat Bogs makes any difference. And 1 test to see if stacking Peat Bogs with 5 blocks clearance works (which would be the area it clears on its own).

 

[Chrono]

I did some tests whit the bogs myself, they do work whit a 1 block wide gap and the turbary can harvest up to three bogs (one on the same level of the turbary and the other two above/below that one)