Been playing around with an idea I had for a methane boiler and wanted some feedback.
Usually I run Stevescarts tree farms to fuel my boilers, either through converting saplings into biofuel or cutting up jungle trees into planks. The biofuel boilers work well but need a whole system just to make mulch if you want to make it "no touch". The plank system works well too, but I hate all the Redpower systems spamming of 50 extra stacks just to satisfy a need of 1.
So, I'm back to wanting to set up a liquid-fired system, as they are much easier to expand and upgrade... simply run the pipes and go.
I've never used methane for boiler fuel before but I began designing this system in singleplayer and the first part worked pretty well:
I set up a tier 5 cow spawner. It would be a pain to get in a survival world but with several feed stations breeding cows I don't imagine it would take all that long to get. The cow spawner was directly below a tesla coil. Within about a second or two of the "wave" of cows spawning, the tesla coil obliterates them all. The next wave spawns very quickly afterwards and meets the same fate, rinse and repeat. Although melee turtles would generate XP, I don't think they would kill as fast as the tesla coil does. I can always set up a blaze farm or something else for XP.
Below the cow spawner is a 9x9 pool of water with water in 4 corners. All of the leather and beef gets pushed to the center block. I put a transposer here that sucks up the items that are pushed directly on top of it.
This generated a ton of leather and beef extremely quickly.
Now, comes the part I didn't have time to set up and test, and need some feedback on. I was thinking that I would use redpower tubes to direct the leather to storage for books, and then take the beef and pipe it into a centrifuge. The centrifuge would process the beef into a methane cell. Redpower machines (or maybe buildcraft pipes with gates would be more compact) would extract the methane cell, and put it into a liquid transposer, which would extract the methane from the cell and pump it into a storage tank. Then, the liquid transposer would send the cell back into the centrifuge via buildcraft pipes (since redpower tubes can't connect to the liquid transposer's output face directly).
Obviously from the tank the methane would go to the boilers.
Now comes the question of efficiency, how much methane is a fully-heated 36HP boiler going to consume? Will one centrifuge be enough for 1 (or more) boilers or will this quickly grow into a massive system just to keep one boiler running?
I'd appreciate any feedback or ideas. Thanks!
Usually I run Stevescarts tree farms to fuel my boilers, either through converting saplings into biofuel or cutting up jungle trees into planks. The biofuel boilers work well but need a whole system just to make mulch if you want to make it "no touch". The plank system works well too, but I hate all the Redpower systems spamming of 50 extra stacks just to satisfy a need of 1.
So, I'm back to wanting to set up a liquid-fired system, as they are much easier to expand and upgrade... simply run the pipes and go.
I've never used methane for boiler fuel before but I began designing this system in singleplayer and the first part worked pretty well:
I set up a tier 5 cow spawner. It would be a pain to get in a survival world but with several feed stations breeding cows I don't imagine it would take all that long to get. The cow spawner was directly below a tesla coil. Within about a second or two of the "wave" of cows spawning, the tesla coil obliterates them all. The next wave spawns very quickly afterwards and meets the same fate, rinse and repeat. Although melee turtles would generate XP, I don't think they would kill as fast as the tesla coil does. I can always set up a blaze farm or something else for XP.
Below the cow spawner is a 9x9 pool of water with water in 4 corners. All of the leather and beef gets pushed to the center block. I put a transposer here that sucks up the items that are pushed directly on top of it.
This generated a ton of leather and beef extremely quickly.
Now, comes the part I didn't have time to set up and test, and need some feedback on. I was thinking that I would use redpower tubes to direct the leather to storage for books, and then take the beef and pipe it into a centrifuge. The centrifuge would process the beef into a methane cell. Redpower machines (or maybe buildcraft pipes with gates would be more compact) would extract the methane cell, and put it into a liquid transposer, which would extract the methane from the cell and pump it into a storage tank. Then, the liquid transposer would send the cell back into the centrifuge via buildcraft pipes (since redpower tubes can't connect to the liquid transposer's output face directly).
Obviously from the tank the methane would go to the boilers.
Now comes the question of efficiency, how much methane is a fully-heated 36HP boiler going to consume? Will one centrifuge be enough for 1 (or more) boilers or will this quickly grow into a massive system just to keep one boiler running?
I'd appreciate any feedback or ideas. Thanks!
.. and possibly Apatite bees in the new updates if what I was hearing was correct.