Efficient Redpower 2 Thermopile setup

[Peppe]

Lava below - water/ice to 3 sides and top. Wire to one side.

A water source block just needs to be on top - flowing water counts and will automatically flow to 3 sides.

If you use ice you will need to use solid blocks around the lava

Water vs ice makes no difference though and each thermopile can share a water/ice block...
Edit: Apparently thermopile's have thier own ice/lava mechanics, too much ice can turn the lava to obsidian. Best stable setup is just have water on top -- flowing to the sides.

All of the Thermopiles run at ~91V and .5 amps = ~45w power when things are full.
Edit: When charging they drop to about 18w. Volt meter jumps around, so not sure what I am seeing. I think 3-4 of these is equal to a solar panel in the day. Obviously these run day and night so 2 could replace a solar panel if you have storage for any spikes in usage.

 

[ff255away]

Thermopile mechanics, if I remember correctly, were described in eloraam's RP2 thread on the minecraft forums. Basically, it was this:
water = 25 cold
ice blocks = 100 cold
lava (moving and still) = 100 heat

For every 100 cold and 100 heat, you get half the power of 1 solar panel, but works regardless of sun position and weather. So, 4 water source blocks and 1 lava source block gives you a full 0.5 solar panels of constant energy.

However, as soon as your heat and/or cold >125, you run the risk of causing the ice to melt and the lava to turn to obsidian (moving lava turns to basalt). The only effective method of power generation that causes this is having 2 ice blocks and 2 moving lava blocks (you can have 3 iceblocks and 3 lava, but then you have no place to connect a wire to the thermopile).

Eloraam, in her infinite kindness, made provisions for this to work indefinitely. If you have bud switches, you can easily make this work. You place your lava source blocks 1 block away from the thermopile, allowing them to create a flow next to the thermopile. Set up a block breaker attached to a bud switch so that when they turn to basalt, they are broken and the lava is allowed to flow again. This can create a very, very slow basalt farm. For your ice, you're going to need something like a IC2 ice set up (which I'm not going into detail to set up here), and another bud switch that removes the water and replaces the ice.

 

[Evil Hamster]

You can make a basalt farm?

Is there a decent tutorial for this somewhere?

All I found on google was a really low quality poorly explained one that uses some stuff I've never seen before.

 

[Rikki21]

Spoiler

Here you go! ShdwDrgn shows how to do it. It's not very fast at all, but it's pretty cool

 

[Evil Hamster]

Cool, thanks. I'll give it a try. Running 24/7 on a server might make up a bit for the slowness. It's tedious finding and mining for my basalt mage tower manually.

 

[57782]

If you have the resources, you can also try stacking them. I built a two layer setup in creative, and after about half an hour it generated 12 basalt.

 

[Evil Hamster]

I built one of these basalt generators, it works decent. Unfortunately it stops working when the battery is full. I'm going to have to figure out a way to keep the battery drained...

And FINALLY there's a use for the glacial precipitator

 

[SilvasRuin]

Use the Bluelectric Engine and feed it into your MJ network.

 

[Evil Hamster]

Actually a couple stacks of dust in a blue furnace completely drained my battery. This is good- it shouldn't be too hard to set up an automated system.

 

[thatsIch]

anyone got a good stackable design? at best no need for a timer
and its so hard to find something about this topic.
For example how you know that it stops working if you dont extract the power?

I saw a video on Youtube, where he didnt have batboxes to extract the power o_o

 

[Saice]

anyone got a good stackable design? at best no need for a timer
and its so hard to find something about this topic.
For example how you know that it stops working if you dont extract the power?

I saw a video on Youtube, where he didnt have batboxes to extract the power o_o

I've been running a stackable setup in my base for about a week now. It just water and lava. No special anything.that is it in the left. basically four stacks of piles a lava source block in the center but above the top pile the eight water source blocks on the corners. at the top of each stack is a battery. That has all the power to run all my sorting systems and two RP powered furnaces and the power alloy furnace with out any issues. none of the flowing lava has turned to basalt on me either.


2013-01-07_22.55.12 by Saice, on Flickr

 

[slay_mithos]

the BT engine was proposed, as it has a terrible conversion rate, so you would need even more BT energy to cook your items in a furnace powered with MJ (thermal expansion one, don't remember the name).

 

[Evil Hamster]

I built a small one to create basalt. Slowly using the basalt to build my mage tower, not really in a rush as I have a hundred other things I'm working on. Thing is- when the battery fills up it will not generate any more basalt- let it sit for hours as a test. Currently, the basalt system is powering my blue alloy furnace and blue furnace, with a wire tapped off to a single retriever. Here's the thing- obviously one thermopile isn't going to generate a lot of energy, not enough to run my dust processing, however if I need some smooth stone I throw it in the blue furnace and generate some basalt as a bonus

 

[Saice]

Ok heres my setup in detail.

Spoiler

This is my footprint. Black is Piles Red is lava source block Yellow is lava flow blocks, Blue is water blocks.


2013-01-10_09.52.26 by Saice, on Flickr

So knock all that out and put down four piles


2013-01-10_09.52.47 by Saice, on Flickr

in my base I have them four high but you can stack them as high as you like


2013-01-10_09.53.06 by Saice, on Flickr

You don't have to have batteries here but I highly suggest you do it gives you a buffer and seems to just run better like this for me.


2013-01-10_09.53.23 by Saice, on Flickr

Now make a box this is where the lava will go. you can also just use one block place the lava and remove that block if your feeling like it. But I like the box thing. If you do free ball the lava you can skip over the lava spreading bit I do later.


2013-01-10_09.54.25 by Saice, on Flickr

Run so wires to link up the pile stacks into pairs. Then drop in your lava. Its going to go straight down (unless you free balled it earlier)


2013-01-10_09.55.10 by Saice, on Flickr

So to spread it drop down some blocks. Like so.


2013-01-10_09.55.29 by Saice, on Flickr

Then form the opposite side add one more block through the lava and it will spread to 3 sides.


2013-01-10_09.55.36 by Saice, on Flickr

Go back to the other side and remove two of them block leaving that the spreader in the middle


2013-01-10_09.56.09 by Saice, on Flickr

you can remove it if you want but either way it should look like this form all sides now


2013-01-10_09.56.16 by Saice, on Flickr

now up top cover you lava source block and add wires to link your two pairs of piles together.


2013-01-10_09.56.37 by Saice, on Flickr

And a ring like so. This is for the water blocks


2013-01-10_09.57.41 by Saice, on Flickr

Add water


2013-01-10_09.58.19 by Saice, on Flickr

And it should end up like this


2013-01-10_09.58.30 by Saice, on Flickr

Its not the most effective way since the temp diff is not as high as say ice or snow. Nor is it using source blocks next to any of the piles. But its pretty much bullet proof. And I can get 2000 watts off this thing after I've let it get settled in about a MC day or so. And like I noted outside of using a RP Engine for some MJ it runs none stop everything else I have working off of RP which is a complex sorting storage system two RP Powered furnaces and a RP Powered Alloy furnace.

 

[Evil Hamster]

Nice design. Maybe someday I'll get around to building something similar

 

[Saice]

Nice design. Maybe someday I'll get around to building something similar

Thanks. I'm new to FTB and Redpower so I still got a lot to learn but I like sharing what I've gleamed.

 

[Evil Hamster]

My problem is there are SO many things I want to build I get into my world after work and I'm like-- uhh what should I work on now lol

 

[Saice]

My problem is there are SO many things I want to build I get into my world after work and I'm like-- uhh what should I work on now lol

LOL same here. I tend to work on multiple things at once and get side tracked a lot.

 

[Antice]

I built a small one to create basalt. Slowly using the basalt to build my mage tower, not really in a rush as I have a hundred other things I'm working on. Thing is- when the battery fills up it will not generate any more basalt- let it sit for hours as a test. Currently, the basalt system is powering my blue alloy furnace and blue furnace, with a wire tapped off to a single retriever. Here's the thing- obviously one thermopile isn't going to generate a lot of energy, not enough to run my dust processing, however if I need some smooth stone I throw it in the blue furnace and generate some basalt as a bonus

Did some creative testing. It turns out that it is not possible to run the glacial precipitators off a single rp2 engine. you need 4 to run one at max. one glacial is capable of feeding a 4 or 5 high stack of those thermopiles... not even close to being enough to power 4 engines. Putting a windmill on top is enough to power those engines tho, so I guess you get to make a wind powered basalt gen.
ETA: Did some more testing on the engines. RP2 engines can give a max of 1Mj/t it seems, but that requires that the batt boxes are quite full. so 2 engines can power a single glacial precipitator to the max. The thermopile tower does not produce nearly enough energy to feed this monster tho, so it would be better to hitch on some other type of engine, and just use a single RP2 one for dumping the RP2 energy to keep the tower producing that sweet black basalt.

 

[Freakscar]

Quick sidequestion about basalt: Is it possible, to prevent lava to form into basalt with a "stacked and ice-cooled" TP tower? I don't mind it being a complicated machine including (the heck^^) a mining well, thirteen pistons and a squirrel powered crucible. You get the idea. If it's possible.. I'd like to know. =)