I hooked up a 1LP boiler to a Hobbyist Steam Engine, which powers a MultiFarm, right? Well, at full heat, a 1LP boiler will burn a bucket of fuel for 243038 ticks, or a little over 202 and a half minutes. A 1HP boiler will also burn a bucket of fuel for 121519 ticks, exactly half the LP boiler at 101 minutes. That's some long-term power! Just thought I would share that with you guys since there seems to be a huge trend of 36HP boilers going around, and everybody seems to ignore the 1-block boilers.
Never Underestimate Small Boilers!
- Thread starter TheAbstractHippo
- Start date
Combustion engine is still more efficient (unless there's some recent nerf I haven't heard about). Combustion engine burns a bucket of fuel for 100000 ticks and produces 3 times as much power as a Hobbyist Steam Engine. In general, smaller liquid fuelled boilers are less efficient than the combustion engine.
On the other hand, a small boiler connected to a steam turbine is probably more efficient than EU-producing items which consume fuel (which tend to be rather inefficient compared to fuel consumers that produce MJ or steam). But then you're building a full turbine so that drives the cost way up to the point that by the time you can afford to use that much steel you are using enough power to warrant a big boiler.
Although, considering you're just powering a Multi Farm, which probably uses less than 6 MJ/t on average, the boiler might be reasonable, since you don't have to set up gates or anything to control it.
Basically, small liquid-fuelled boilers are useless unless you only need a couple MJ/t (as in your case), you are burning creosote oil (which isn't really a good primary source of fuel) or you don't have Buildcraft (limiting your options to ethanol from Forestry or biofuel from MFR).
Small solid-fuelled boilers are pretty good, though, as they use coal/charcoal much more efficiently than the stirling engine or TE's steam engine.
On the other hand, a small boiler connected to a steam turbine is probably more efficient than EU-producing items which consume fuel (which tend to be rather inefficient compared to fuel consumers that produce MJ or steam). But then you're building a full turbine so that drives the cost way up to the point that by the time you can afford to use that much steel you are using enough power to warrant a big boiler.
Although, considering you're just powering a Multi Farm, which probably uses less than 6 MJ/t on average, the boiler might be reasonable, since you don't have to set up gates or anything to control it.
Basically, small liquid-fuelled boilers are useless unless you only need a couple MJ/t (as in your case), you are burning creosote oil (which isn't really a good primary source of fuel) or you don't have Buildcraft (limiting your options to ethanol from Forestry or biofuel from MFR).
Small solid-fuelled boilers are pretty good, though, as they use coal/charcoal much more efficiently than the stirling engine or TE's steam engine.
Yeah. MultiFarms only need, like, 2 MJ/t, so I just used a power source that would last an incredibly long time.
You can power a multiblock farm off a clockwork engine if you really wanted efficiency 
I actually do this quite a lot.
1 LP boiler fed off of planks from logs from tree farm -> steam engine -> powers tree farm and a second multifarm doing something else. 2 MJ/t is actually still more than smallest size farms need; for a 3x3 quad arboretum it's under 1 MJ/t. Multifarms do amazingly well on trickle power, and small boilers do amazingly well to provide trickle power
1 LP boiler fed off of planks from logs from tree farm -> steam engine -> powers tree farm and a second multifarm doing something else. 2 MJ/t is actually still more than smallest size farms need; for a 3x3 quad arboretum it's under 1 MJ/t. Multifarms do amazingly well on trickle power, and small boilers do amazingly well to provide trickle power
I actually do this quite a lot.
1 LP boiler fed off of planks from logs from tree farm -> steam engine -> powers tree farm and a second multifarm doing something else. 2 MJ/t is actually still more than smallest size farms need; for a 3x3 quad arboretum it's under 1 MJ/t. Multifarms do amazingly well on trickle power, and small boilers do amazingly well to provide trickle power
Also, in case of a cold shutdown of the energy network. getting your renewable fuel source back up and running is a lot easier with a small boiler for kickstarting everything rather than having to fire up a large 36HP monster.
I rarely use the 1LP one tho. i tend to prefer a 8 LP solid fueled one with a connected steam oven. might have to do with mostly using MFR farms rather than the forestry ones tho. MFR harvesters do use quite the amount of power in bursts. any excess steam is just dumped. I never worry too much about efficiency in my over unity plants.
I power 3 full size multi farms off of 18 industrial steam engines being powered by a 36hp boiler. Why? Because I can. Amurica.
Yes, the nice thing about these small boilers is if you were to take a stack of buckets or a few portable tanks to the nearest oil spout, collect some oil, and then refine that back at home, that would last an incredibly long time.
That, or only a very small amount of renewable power, such as wooden planks as Omicron uses.
It's always a shame to pass by an oil spout, have buckets, but not bother since it isn't 'efficient', and then come back later and suck it dry when I have Ender Tanks or Liquid Tesseracts. I'm skipping some potential early-game content there. I'm the kind of MMO player that will re-roll just to experience different content or the same content, but in a different way.
Check this out!!
http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/the-final-word-on-steam-boiler-efficiency.13506/
Take 30 minutes or one hour of reading time and then a day of reflecting
http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/the-final-word-on-steam-boiler-efficiency.13506/
Take 30 minutes or one hour of reading time and then a day of reflecting
Yeah, I've read that before. It's pretty awesome. I just posted this because a lot of people skip straight to the 36HP boilers, and miss out on the small boilers.Check this out!!
http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/the-final-word-on-steam-boiler-efficiency.13506/
Take 30 minutes or one hour of reading time and then a day of reflecting
Yeah, I've read that before. It's pretty awesome. I just posted this because a lot of people skip straight to the 36HP boilers, and miss out on the small boilers.
And right you are
I am now using one (I think) a 12LP boiler for my entire base and having plenty to go around... Ok, I do have to expand when my base is going to grow, but LP is more then enough!
Not efficient when it's prone to exploding when it's chunk is unloaded (unless that's been fixed).
That was never an issue with the combustion engine but rather with the coolant feed. If the chunk with the water supply unloads but the engine doesn't, then you have a crater on your hands.
The same counts for boilers. If your water supply unloads and the boiler doesn't, and the boiler manages to run out of water before the water supply is loaded again, then it will violently redesign the landscape as soon as water is available again.
In both cases the recommendation is the same: keep water supply and engine/boiler in the same chunk.
engines have another way of going boom too... if any one section of the power conduit leading from the engine unloads, so that the engine is now unable to transfer it's power anywhere. It will rapidly disassemble itself and anything close by after a while as well. this is also true of steam engines.
fun times
that one piece of golden conductive pipe that got outside the chunk boundrary once, because i didnt notice that i got into the wrong chunks corner when using a spotloader.... that single pipe and the chunk was intact, while there was a nice big hole in the other 3 chunks sharing the same boundrary corner. lesson learned tho. be careful of where the corners are as well.I remembered a friend of mine randomly sticking 1-4HP boilers all around, fueled with our tesseract biofuel system. Got pretty mad at him for creating ugly boilers on the surface, but they were extremely useful. Porta-power, guess the 25% energy loss was too much for him to bear
drove me so insane, still shuddering
drove me so insane, still shuddering
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
This is quite a neat way of throttling back the power to certain machines, Its a fairly portable supply of 2-4 MJ which still runs with a decent efficiency compared to straight up engine power ...well solid fuel anyway.
-and a fairly neat solution given the alternatives of 8MJ (cobblestone pipe) or 5MJ (RS energy cell) linked in from the main powergrid.
-and a fairly neat solution given the alternatives of 8MJ (cobblestone pipe) or 5MJ (RS energy cell) linked in from the main powergrid.
Even that wasn't good enough. Back in the dark times, before tanks and TE, the infinite water pool + pump was used. Sometimes, just sometimes, the pump would suck up water before the previous water had respawned. End result, the infinite water pool became less than infinite. It happened even if the water supply and engine were in the same chunk as I think it was a function of the chunk un/loading in the middle of the water being respawned.
This is actually going away. The latest version of BC no longer has explodipipes. In fact, from the spotlight I saw, they act more like TE's REConduits now in that power demand is transmitted via the network so engines can auto-throttle.
The engines do explode if they aren't throttleable. (like the RC steam engines) i wasn't speaking of explody pipes, since that hasn't been in since unleashed 1.1.3 at the least. (1.1.4 has the early iteration kinesis pipes, from before they got renamed.)
If there is nowhere for the energy to go, it stores up in the engines now. and when that buffer is full, you get a boom.