Energy-Effiecient Treefarm Designs? (Forestry)

[JMakAttak3]

Hiya, I'm running two Forestry farms off of a Steam Boiler --> Steam-filled Iron Tank --> Commercial Steam Engine layout and it's working decently well.

I'm wondering how you can conserve energy on a Forestry farm? Constantly running engines is somewhat useless, especially for my Loggers, which only actually do work when they cut down trees.

Is there a way to use BC gates or something else to keep the energy costs down a little bit, or is there another self-sustaining format I could be using for this?

Thanks! ^_^

 

[b0bst3r]

2 tree farms supply enough surplus saplings for fermenters to turn into biomass and power your farms from biogas engines. I currently power all my farms (5 of) from my 2 tree farm saplings.

 

[Zjarek_S]

In this situation I now use energy cells. 1 MJ/t should be enough for treefarm (arboretum and logger), if there will be too many grown trees for your liking you can bump it up to for example 2 MJ/t (you can get finer control in energy cells using right mouse button). Forestry harvesting machines can use a lot of power and then they are working really fast. It is unfortunately not so effective with slowly growing plants. In 1.2.5 I used peat engines, which got one peat every day (RP2 light sensor and pulse former for transposers).

 

[JMakAttak3]

2 tree farms supply enough surplus saplings for fermenters to turn into biomass and power your farms from biogas engines. I currently power all my farms (5 of) from my 2 tree farm saplings.

Hm, I'll definitely try it! I've never gotten into the biomass/fermentation side of Forestry, so I suppose I'll do this.
How do you power your Fermenters, then?

 

[b0bst3r]

biogas engines

Hm, I'll definitely try it! I've never gotten into the biomass/fermentation side of Forestry, so I suppose I'll do this.
How do you power your Fermenters, then?

Same biogas engines which power the farms power my fermenters, all in all it supplies it's own power and set up right it's all automated, I use railcraft cart to whizz around my farms loading and unloading as it goes.

 

[Mero]

couple the 2 tree farms with a peat bog and run them off of peat engines.
The peat bog supplies dirt as a waste product and the tree farms supply sand as a waste product. All you need to do is supply the water for bog earth. I have found the tree farms to go through humus rather slowly so it is no problem to make a sizable batch of it every once in a while to feed the tree farms or have it automated if you already do.

1 peat engine fueling each farm will not be able to use up all the peat produced so you will always have a surplus of peat to work with on other projects.

 

[JMakAttak3]

biogas engines

Same biogas engines which power the farms power my fermenters, all in all it supplies it's own power and set up right it's all automated, I use railcraft cart to whizz around my farms loading and unloading as it goes.

Just tried this in a test world -- all worked really well after some compacting and tweaking. Coupled with an aqueous accumulator, this farm needs zero maintenance besides supplying humus and optional catalyst, all you need to do is supply the lava, saplings, and humus to start.
Cool. ^_^[DOUBLEPOST=1355093524][/DOUBLEPOST]

couple the 2 tree farms with a peat bog and run them off of peat engines.
The peat bog supplies dirt as a waste product and the tree farms supply sand as a waste product. All you need to do is supply the water for bog earth. I have found the tree farms to go through humus rather slowly so it is no problem to make a sizable batch of it every once in a while to feed the tree farms or have it automated if you already do.

1 peat engine fueling each farm will not be able to use up all the peat produced so you will always have a surplus of peat to work with on other projects.

Yup, like I said, it's just the annoying humus that isn't 100% self-sustained.

 

[jim johnstone]

I posted some pics in another thread with my design http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/efficient-eu-production.2387/page-2 , but I'll have a go at explaining the setup.

Basement with routing excess items to chests, 2 x carpenters for bog earth and humus. Also contains a mulching room, biomass and seed oil tanks with production and everything powered by biomass engines. Wood goes to another plant next door, producing charcoal and creosote, charcoal then heading to generators turning it into IC2 energy.

1st floor has the peat farm, 2nd and 3rd are wheat farms and top floor for the tree farm. All the engines here are peat powered with overflow chests for the mats needed. Once the main chests are full, the overflow chests pump materials (seeds, saplings, spare peat) down to the basement for sorting and processing. All this can be done through the building 'core' and if you leave a 3 block gap, then add a 3 deep layer of glowstone over the wheat, you have enough light for 24hr growth. Requires a lot of resources (d-pipes are essential) but if you set it up right, you can have 1 main pipe running through the building with almost everything going through it, the exception being the peat for engines.

An alternative would be to splash out on a hybrid solar panel and MFU, placing it dead central and 3 blocks above the arboretum, then running wire to electrical engines, replacing the peat ones which would save a lot of space and pipes, as well as getting rid of the pesky ash... The system can keep 9 coke ovens full in the charcoal/creosote plant (although i've added a second tree farm on that building, bumping it to 24 ovens-which turned out to be a little overkill, lol) with wood to spare.

Outputs wood, apples, excess wheat, excess mulch, seed oil and biomass with, if you add on the coke ovens, creosote and EU from burning charcoal and peat.

 

[Mero]

Yup, like I said, it's just the annoying humus that isn't 100% self-sustained.

Well, the Humus can be completely automatic, but I doubt that only 3 peat engines will produce enough ash.

4 ash around a dirt will produce compost. 1 compost surrounded by 8 dirt will produce humus.

That just leaves the water part of making the peat, which will be solved once redpower is added. Then all you need is a deployer, 2 filters an infinite water pool and a sequencer or timer.

Then you just need to automate some bee production to produce wax for capsules.

That will be a completely contained system that uses none of your other power.

 

[Hrulgin]

If you're willing to make it more complex, you can squeeze the apples for juice and mulch, and then run the mulch, water and dirt into a carpenter, and create humus there. This also has the upside that you get juice for biomatter/fuel.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

You can also make compost with 4x wheat around a dirt for 4x Humus. Gives your regular farm something to spend all that wheat on while it is making seeds to turn into seed oil for your impregnated frames.

 

[b0bst3r]

I make Humus and bog peat from mulch made in a moistener from wheat, that in turn with the dirt chucked out by the bog farm and sand thrown out by the tree farms goes into auto crafting the humus and bog peat. It is self sufficient if set up right.

 

[Daemonblue]

For the moistener can you get it to run without any output or does it require you to have an output such as mossy cobble or mycelium?

 

[b0bst3r]

Needs output but u can diamond pipe it to split off the mulch from mycelium (which I don't have a use for yet, since no mushroom farm) and send the mulch to a carpenter.

Edit - Oh and before we get onto carpenters and piping, it took me a while to figure out how to get it to work. What I mean by that is when I piped in any item it went into the carton slot in the carpenter. I eventually figured out that you HAVE to have a recipe set before those recipe items dropped into the inventory section at the bottom. You pipe in any other item which is not in the recipe and it will go to the carton slot.