Question about wooden waterproof pipes extracting from iron tanks.

[Strubinator]

Ok, so I am fairly new to FTB, and decided to mess around in creative mode to familiarize myself with some things.
I made a HP boiler, as large as I could make it, fed by coal coke. The steam feeds two turbines at 100%, and the rest fills up two 7x7x8 steam tanks. The tanks filled up pretty quick, about 30 min. When I tried to pump out the steam, it was rather disappointing. I had a few waterproof wooden pipes connected to about 4 valves on the bottom row, powered by industrial steam engines, and then electrical engines, piping the steam to a turbine. The steam engines produced so much excess power they exploded. But even with several electrical engines I only got a trickle of steam from the tank. Is there a limit on how much liquid a wooden pipe or valve can handle? Id like to note that they were connected to gold waterproof pipes, as they should be.
Whats the best way to extract fluid from the iron tanks? No point in stockpiling steam or biofuel on my legit worlds if I cant even get enough to power the boiler and steam engine.
I would like to know what I am doing wrong. The boiler is prefectly fine, half temperature and producing more than enough steam to power what I will need, the problem is getting the excess steam out of the tanks for later use in a reasonable amount.

 

[Squigie]

Gold waterproof pipes have 4 times the capacity of other pipes, and steam is used in such large amounts that is difficult to store effectively. A redstone engine or autarchic gate is sufficient pump a wooden waterproof pipe at max speed, but that is only enough steam to produce 2 MJ/t in a RC steam engine.

Other liquid fuels (fuel, biofuel, lava, etc.) are consumed at a much slower rate, including in a liquid firebox, so storing them in tanks is useful.

 

[jammiewins]

Boilers are designed in such a way that you use the steam as it is created, rather than tanking it. As to getting liquids out of tanks, I think the fastest way unfortunately is to have lots of wooden waterproof pipes, and as far as i can tell they can only take a single redstone engine's worth of power. Adding 2 engines to 1 pipe is no faster, unlike with item transport pipes.

 

[thatsIch]

indeed you have to use golden pipes cause the have a higher "bandwidth" as Squigie said.
Boilers are often used to _not_ create steam on demand, but to make a maintanless energy-source via
Railcraft Steamtank + Thermalexpansion Magma Crucible + Thermalexpansion Igneous Extrude + Buildcraft Industrial Steam Engine
those can create in colloberation energy without any re-fuel as suggested in

http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/what-does-your-power-room-look-like.2129/page-4

if you want on demand energy you would be better of with Thermalexpansions Redstone Energy Cell and creating it on any way.

if you are more familiar with Industrialcrafts EU System you can store your access EU into MFSU or higher (avaiable in Gregtech) and convert it into MJ by using Forestry's Electrical Engines though its not that fitting for large-scale MJ production imho.

 

[Strubinator]

Thanks for the comments. If I wanted to power it with biofuel, how many forestry tree farms and wheat, or steve's carts' tree farms and wheat farms would I need to create the biomass needed? Or is lava the absolutely best way to keep the boiler fueled. Can it take liquid lava, or would I need to put it in buckets first?

 

[Zelfana]

Lava is going to get heavily nerfed as boiler fuel in 1.4.5. Liquid fueled doesn't accept lava, you need to bucket it for solid fueled firebox. It's not really going to be worth it considering the long warm up. Magmatic engines would be easier if you use lava.

And yeah, don't pipe the steam. Just put industrial steam engines directly on the boiler and pipe the power instead. Redstone energy conduits are even better for power piping as they lose only a tiny amount of MJ.

Haven't tried liquid fuels yet, don't have anything to say about those.

 

[madaffacca]

For my personal experience, I think that if storing steam was more easy, nobody would ever do anything else. It's way too easy to set up a fully automatic steam production facility (forestry tree farm for charcoal, wheat farm for compost to autocraft humus) and you're done, plenty of steam to power some Industrial Steam engine that produces 120% more MJ than a combustion engine when kept stable. To me, steam is a bit overpowered, hope it gets nerfed in future version.

 

[Strubinator]

I still plan on using nukes for eu, but steam engines still need loads of power and resources.

 

[WTFFFS]

I still plan on using nukes for eu, but steam engines still need loads of power and resources.

Unless they default the config to, reactors produce steam.........which is entirely possible in the next revision of IC2.

 

[Exedra]

tHaven't tried liquid fuels yet, don't have anything to say about those.

So I heard, biofuel appears to be a good one to go with.

 

[Bibble]

In my semi-current world, I was using a tree farm to keep a boiler going. That gave me an ungodly number of extra saplings to contend with. I ended up using the spare steam from the boiler to turn them into biofuel, and have a glut of IC2 power almost as a byproduct. IC2 wasn't my main focus, so I only really looked at it very hard when I had a 64x64 quarry run to the ground, so resources weren't a huge issue.

I'd agree that steam seems to be a somewhat instantaneous semi-fuel, which means that you need to make sure you've got a large enough boiler to cover your peak needs. But, when you're building a boiler, the difference between 3 high, and 4 high isn't particularly huge. The key point (particularly when you bring world anchors into the equation) is to make sure that whatever you're eventual input is (humus, in my case), you've got enough lead time to keep it topped up when you might be on the server. The fuel wastage from letting a boiler go even half cold is really extreme.

 

[Strubinator]

I think it might be a good idea to use the steam I wouldnt use for buildcraft, and use it in turbines.
Also, this is me just messing around in creative learning the mods. It will be a while until I get myself a boiler legit.

 

[Zelfana]

Turbines are too much work for the EU they produce. Just power some magma crucibles you can feed with igneous extruders' cobblestone or netherrack you collected yourself and have those feed geothermal generators. You get less EU per MJ but you use less materials and it's maintenance free if you use cobblestone.

 

[Daemonblue]

I've been doing some messing around with the liquid fireboxes myself, and as long as you can keep a steady supply of materials to create biomass and biofuel the HP boilers can pretty much power the whole system and then some. That said, I would heat up the boiler to around 500C using biofuel capsules first so it won't take as long to heat up the boiler - it'll power the whole system as soon as steam can be produced, but the temp doesn't rise as quickly due to higher consumption.