It's actually not a bad deal. Sadly Steam is not very energy dense so you can't use tanks as a battery. But you could make lava or oil with it (very slowly).
InfiniWatermill, How to make without RP2?
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It's actually not a bad deal. Sadly Steam is not very energy dense so you can't use tanks as a battery. But you could make lava or oil with it (very slowly).
Sorry, but please say again, slowly for us imbeciles now... Factorization solar boilers can be set up on top/sides of a railcraft tank and they will automatically dump their steam into that tank?
Put a hobbyist steam engine on top of a factorization solar boiler and it'll get external steam. Which also uncaps its potential, max output is 3mjt/t. I think it needs 10 mirrors and daylight to get this, so thats 80 silver, but it'll start running slowly with just 2 mirrors. So you can scale it up.
Liquid pipes will work too, but of all the pipes they're the hardest to make early-game.
I've done this with buildcraft pipes and a Xycraft tank with xychorium water filling it (in the nether, hilariously enough). An emerald pipe on the bottom of each water mill pulls out its bucket when it's empty. The pipes are arranged in a loop, with a diamond pipe at one spot moving empty buckets into the tank's item I/O, with a wooden pipe pulling filled buckets out of it. Filled buckets will go around the pipe loop until they find a home in a water mill (50/50 chance for the bucket to go into an empty water mill or continue along the loop; might get a few misses before it finds its place, but shouldn't be too bad). Now that I know about routers, though, they'd be a vastly superior solution.
It's not entirely the same, but if you can cheaply produce Water Bottles you can use BC pipes to insert them. Because they get consumed you don't need to worry about taking them out or refilling them, so a long line of Insertion pipes (which are now also in TE I believe) can feed Water Mills quite well.
The best way I found to make cheap Water Bottles was using the Advanced IC2 machines, they take just as much power as a regular Macerator/Electric furnace but are insanely fast. With this setup you need to go very large scale though for it to become efficient, so it isn't that great for early game or "free power" in general. Just to give you some numbers, with ~60 Water Mills, 1 Liquid Transposer and 2 Rotary Macerators+Furnaces I got ~110 EU/t of which ~50EU/t had to go back into the system, and it yielded ~50 EU/t (I guess ~10EU/t got lost to resistance or other weirdness, it was fully Glass Fiber and Tin cable though).
btw, the reason it works is because Water Bottles in Mills produce 2EU/t, compared to Buckets who produce 1EU/t. That 1EU/t difference is what you can use to make Glass Bottles and reach the same power output as a Bucket system. So the more efficient you can make Glass Bottles the more you'll get out of it.
You can also do buckets with BC pipes, but it requires a lot of piping and it will get huge and messy (the water bottle way is easier to setup and is more efficient and compact, even with the power cost to make Water Bottles). Basically you put a Wooden pipe under the water mill to take out the buckets and then have a Diamond pipe to sort the empty and full buckets coming through. A Water Mill that's empty will instantly empty a water bucket, so it's no problem they get taken out quickly after getting inserted. 1 Diamond pipe per Water Mill is expensive though and then you still have the problem of distributing the Water Buckets evenly. I used Round Robin pipes from Addition BC objects to achieve that as Diamond pipes don't cut it in that regard, though Emerald pipes might be able to help you there, those weren't around when I did this. Also all the Iron needed for the Buckets is just insane, you'll need more than in a Tube system because the distribution isn't as efficient and it's slower as well due to the distance the buckets have to travel through your pipe maze.
I've got some old screens in case you're interested in the Water Bottle system: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qe47p826lkjyssy/ZaDxQDAyI5
But that's all I got, the world got corrupted and I never bothered to set up a system like this again (or in a survival world for that matter). I did make an even bigger system than what you see there though and I remember it was even more efficient (and definitely more compact xD).
The best way I found to make cheap Water Bottles was using the Advanced IC2 machines, they take just as much power as a regular Macerator/Electric furnace but are insanely fast. With this setup you need to go very large scale though for it to become efficient, so it isn't that great for early game or "free power" in general. Just to give you some numbers, with ~60 Water Mills, 1 Liquid Transposer and 2 Rotary Macerators+Furnaces I got ~110 EU/t of which ~50EU/t had to go back into the system, and it yielded ~50 EU/t (I guess ~10EU/t got lost to resistance or other weirdness, it was fully Glass Fiber and Tin cable though).
btw, the reason it works is because Water Bottles in Mills produce 2EU/t, compared to Buckets who produce 1EU/t. That 1EU/t difference is what you can use to make Glass Bottles and reach the same power output as a Bucket system. So the more efficient you can make Glass Bottles the more you'll get out of it.
You can also do buckets with BC pipes, but it requires a lot of piping and it will get huge and messy (the water bottle way is easier to setup and is more efficient and compact, even with the power cost to make Water Bottles). Basically you put a Wooden pipe under the water mill to take out the buckets and then have a Diamond pipe to sort the empty and full buckets coming through. A Water Mill that's empty will instantly empty a water bucket, so it's no problem they get taken out quickly after getting inserted. 1 Diamond pipe per Water Mill is expensive though and then you still have the problem of distributing the Water Buckets evenly. I used Round Robin pipes from Addition BC objects to achieve that as Diamond pipes don't cut it in that regard, though Emerald pipes might be able to help you there, those weren't around when I did this. Also all the Iron needed for the Buckets is just insane, you'll need more than in a Tube system because the distribution isn't as efficient and it's slower as well due to the distance the buckets have to travel through your pipe maze.
I've got some old screens in case you're interested in the Water Bottle system: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qe47p826lkjyssy/ZaDxQDAyI5
But that's all I got, the world got corrupted and I never bothered to set up a system like this again (or in a survival world for that matter). I did make an even bigger system than what you see there though and I remember it was even more efficient (and definitely more compact xD).
Auto-producing system of glass bottles to aqueous accumulator+liquid transposer in filling mode.
Output all that into Insertion Pipes and you're good to go (Insertion Pipes from TE are essentialy RP2 tubes that interact with BC Pipes - worth the cost).
Output all that into Insertion Pipes and you're good to go (Insertion Pipes from TE are essentialy RP2 tubes that interact with BC Pipes - worth the cost).
I've just done some testing with a solar boiler. Powered by 56 mirrors (the maximum number), it produces enough steam for 1 industrial steam engine and 1 hobbyist's steam engine - a total of 10 mj/t. Not massive amounts, but its basically free aside from the upfront costs.
It does have a disadvantage however: those upfront costs are quite considerable, since all those mirrors need 7 stacks of silver - 3.5 stacks of silver ore. That's a lot early on, but what else can you use silver for early on? However, its also not very space efficient - even a bunch of regular solars are better (though they do have an even higher upfront cost with GT installed). I must say though, this system does look pretty cool - maybe i'll use it in my next world.
It does have a disadvantage however: those upfront costs are quite considerable, since all those mirrors need 7 stacks of silver - 3.5 stacks of silver ore. That's a lot early on, but what else can you use silver for early on? However, its also not very space efficient - even a bunch of regular solars are better (though they do have an even higher upfront cost with GT installed). I must say though, this system does look pretty cool - maybe i'll use it in my next world.
In response to the original question, vanilla dispensers can fill buckets. So all you have to worry about is getting the buckets to the water mills, which is a bit more complicated since water mills don't accept items from BC pipes, TE insertion pipes, or Factorization routers.
Not for me, for some reason. Routers can extract buckets from water mills easily, but nothing seems to be able to insert them into water mills. Buckets loop around forever even when using insertion pipes, and they just get stuck in routers instead of getting sent to the water mills...
Hmmm. Odd. I'm assuming you're on 1.5? Maybe I just need to update to a newer IC2 build or something.
I'm using the 1.5.(2?) beta mod pack with GT installed, but configured to non-insanity.
I admire your ungodly powers of thread necromancy, sir.
But, yeah, this was always an exploit that wasn't intended behavior in IC2. To be honest, I'm surprised it took this long to lock off.