I just realized something funny.

[warfighter67]

Let's say you want a source of BC power to be lava. You have two options here:

Geothermal generators powering 4 electrical engines (each one have iron tube in a small circuit) producing 8 MJ/t
Magmatic engine producing 4 MJ/t once fully heated.

Seem a little odd?

The only other thing I want to know is how quickly does either consume lava? I would hope the magmatic consumes less...

But this just shows that electric engines aren't always a waste of EU as some people seem to think. xD

 

[RivingtonDown]

A Magmatic Engine produces 18,000 MJ per bucket of lava at the rate of 4MJ/t

That means a Magmatic Engine will last 4500 ticks (18,000 / 4) on a bucket of lava. Total it will produce 18,000 MJ over roughly 225 seconds.

A Geothermal Generator produces 20,000 EU per bucket of lava
Four Electrical Engines with Efficiency produce 8MJ/t at 20EU/t

That means those four engines will last roughly 1000 ticks (20,000 / 20) on a bucket of lava. Total it will produce 8000 MJ (8 x 1000) over roughly 50 seconds.

EDIT: DISCLAIMER -- I'm terrible at math and could be completely off.

To even out the numbers a bit:
Two Magmatic Engines would produce 8MJ/t for almost 4 minutes on two buckets of lava. Two buckets of lava in a Geothermal/Electrical Engine setup would produce 8MJ/t for less than 2 minutes.

 

[ApSciLiara]

If my math is right, 4.5 buckets of lava will make four Electrical Engines produce 36000 MJ over the time it needs a Magmatic Engine to make 18000 MJ. So that means that for every 4.5 buckets of fuel you feed a Geo Generator powering for Electrical Engines, you get twice the MJ output? No thanks.
If somebody could check my math, though, that'd be great.

 

[Daemonblue]

Pretty much that. Electric Engines run on a 6 eu for 2 mj ratio, making them horrible for converting EU to MJ (like most machines tbh). This is actually why people use magma crucibles to do the exact opposite of this and turn MJ to EU currently (until it gets nerfed as we all should know it will). What they do is use the crucible to make lava with 20,000 MJ (if burning cobble), then you drop that lava in a geothermal generator for 20,000 EU. Basically, almosat all energy conversion methods outside of that are pretty horrible. The only other one that can be considered "decent" is turbines, and only if you have so much spare ron that you don't mind throwing it into a black hole (if using Greg Tech, not saying the mod is bad, just saying Matter Fabricators use a ton of energy).

Personally, I trend more to the fully automatic systems, so if I need MJ converted to EU I'm goin with the crucible method.

@ Ap By your math though you're burning 4.5 buckets of lava in 4 engines compared to a single Magmatic engine's single bucket at 18,000 MJ, in other words apples to oranges. Try balancing out the calculations a bit so you get 4 buckets burning in 4 Magmatic engines and you'll see that you'll get 72,000 MJ, and there's a half bucket in favor of the 4 electricals.

 

[warfighter67]

Keep in mind the engines are upgraded with iron tube which means 5 eu/t for 2 mj/t.

Lava cells claim to make 50,000 EU (which is what I'm using.. not pumping direct lava) however IC2 wiki states 20,000 EU. I'll do the math for both.
That means 1 bucket/cell produces 50k EU, thus 20k MJ

OR

20k EU, thus 8k MJ.

So further testing revealed that one lava cell produces 20,000 EU. Thus, my OP is a total failure and I should feel shamed of myself [DOUBLEPOST=1356233160][/DOUBLEPOST]

Pretty much that. Electric Engines run on a 6 eu for 2 mj ratio, making them horrible for converting EU to MJ (like most machines tbh). This is actually why people use magma crucibles to do the exact opposite of this and turn MJ to EU currently (until it gets nerfed as we all should know it will). What they do is use the crucible to make lava with 20,000 MJ (if burning cobble), then you drop that lava in a geothermal generator for 20,000 EU. Basically, almosat all energy conversion methods outside of that are pretty horrible. The only other one that can be considered "decent" is turbines, and only if you have so much spare ron that you don't mind throwing it into a black hole (if using Greg Tech, not saying the mod is bad, just saying Matter Fabricators use a ton of energy).

Personally, I trend more to the fully automatic systems, so if I need MJ converted to EU I'm goin with the crucible method.

@ Ap By your math though you're burning 4.5 buckets of lava in 4 engines compared to a single Magmatic engine's single bucket at 18,000 MJ, in other words apples to oranges. Try balancing out the calculations a bit so you get 4 buckets burning in 4 Magmatic engines and you'll see that you'll get 72,000 MJ, and there's a half bucket in favor of the 4 electricals.

Damn, I'm doin' it wrong then! New to TE and all, heh.

When I get home I'm going to get rid of my electric engines and start having my quarry send cobblestone to a magma crucible.

 

[Daemonblue]

Another thing you could do, and has been mentioned by me to near excess by now in other threads, is build some steam boilers and a way to keep them piping hot and filled with liquid. A single 36HP boiler (max sized and power) can produce 720 steam, which can be turned into 144 MJ/t. However, the machines required to keep a boiler such as this take considerably less to power, so you effectively gain a massive energy source that has the added bonus of being nearly 50% more fuel efficient than other engines - a liquid boiler, for example, can turn a single bucket of biofuel into just over 290k MJ when at max temperature, while other methods of burning biofuel cap out at 200k MJ per bucket. Having said that, boilers are more of a permanent structure than any other engine, so it's not something you'll want to have to move constantly, but for a central power base it's very effective, especially when combined with Energy Cells so you can leech any extra MJ out of the system and store it or even use it to power quarries.

 

[warfighter67]

Hmm another thing came to mind.

Couldn't I technically quarry the Nether and produce lava for 4000MJ and in turn use that lava to power a magmatic engine to generate a net profit of 14,000 MJ?

Self-powering Nether quarry? I think YES.

 

[Daemonblue]

That's what some people are already doing until the expected nerf. From what I gather it was a way to get people to stop pumping out the nether so it won't lag servers. If lava had better fluid dynamics this probably wouldn't be such a big problem though, since as it is pumping the nether will create constantly flowing lava that you'd have to block off manually to remove, or with something like a filler.

 

[WTFFFS]

Hmm another thing came to mind.

Couldn't I technically quarry the Nether and produce lava for 4000MJ and in turn use that lava to power a magmatic engine to generate a net profit of 14,000 MJ?

Self-powering Nether quarry? I think YES.

8000mj in latest version of TE so net profit of 10k instead. (also configurable so if on a server ymmv)

 

[warfighter67]

8000mj in latest version of TE so net profit of 10k instead. (also configurable so if on a server ymmv)

By that math, that's just around 2.22 MJ/t per magmatic engine in a system using magma crucibles.

 

[knight2109]

Why use the magma crucible when there is so much simmering comb >.< also creating lava this way is much cheaper in mj consumption i believe.

 

[djtlite138]

My crew uses ultimate hybrid solars to generate EU in an array of 30, one benefit of pooled resources being the ridiculous amount of forcicium and levels that can be converted to Iridium in the uncrafting table (yes we know of the glitch but choose to avoid it for the same reason we keep gregtech enabled) then convert that into MJ with electrical engines and charge redstone energy cells with them to power mobile machines, once we were able to make our first few pairs of IDSUs and go off to mine and process materials in different ages we were able consistantly make more and more power generation equipment. At this point when i build a machine for personal use i set up an IDSU, AESU then either direct into the machines or have the engine after the AESU powering a redstone energy cell which gets turned of when not in use. If we lose this world with the next update i will likely go with MJ to EU and maybe dabble in Blutricity into MJ and make a steam boiler and biofuel setup. My only use for wheat atm is for beekeeper NPCs i keep trapped in apiary stalls in the bee field behind my house.

 

[King Lemming]

Good news everyone! Your math is correct on all counts here.

More nerfs incoming - don't get *too* reliant on these.

 

[ApSciLiara]

Good news everyone! Your math is correct on all counts here.

Wait, I did maths right for once? I'm like... the queen of sucking at maths.