No, the best solution is the extractor and furnace heaters.
Alright, you got into RoC. Thank me later.
You know... I think you're right.
RoC is surprisingly cheap for ore tripling and can be quite early game if you mine enough iron, you don't even need to go as far as an extractor either, the grinder is capable of grinding ore for tripling.
It is rather slow early game though as you do not have easy access to high speed engines with enough torque to meet it's requirements.
Problem with RoC is though; It takes some tinkering to learn hence why people think it's a late game thing. A lot of resources can be wasted trying to figure things out by say makeing the wrong ratio gearbox for an engine or making too many engines to make things work. Also understanding how torque and speed work, power/ energy it's self is mind bendingly complicated (for a game that is) too. For instance a machine will have a specific power minimum requirement, you look through the book for an engine that appears to meet this requirement and more so only to find it doesn't work.
For Eg. The extractor requires an overall power of 65536wats to run at it's maximum and the micro turbine can produce 2097152 wats that's 32 times the amount of wattage it needs but one micro turbine alone will never run an extractor to it's fullest because it just doesn't have the torque for stage one and four when useing conventional gearboxes (maybe a CVT can allow this as it goes past the 16:1 ratios, But I don't know).
Edit: did the calculations, there is no ratio that will let a lone micro Turbine run an extractor through all 4 stages.