steam boiler

[silent assasin]

hello and goodmorning! im new to this forum
im trying to set up a steam boiler but i can't decide if i need to use high or low pressure and commercial or industrial steam engines... i'd appreciate if someone could tell me the difference, because i couldnt find it on the internet

 

[RetroGamer1224]

I strongly suggest watching some of Direwolf20 videos on Railcraft as well as his latest single player video. He uses a steam boiler and explains it pretty well.

 

[Dafuq?]

The difference between LP and HP is that a HP boiler burns twice as fast through your fuel, thus producing twice as much energy in the same time. So the question is how much power do you need? With a max size LP boiler you can run 9 industrial steam engines, which produce 8MJ/tick each (commercials produce 4, but you can run 18 of them on a LP boiler). So with one LP boiler you can produce a total of 72MJ/tick, regardless of the engines you use, which is largely enough for me. If you're not planning on powering a massfab with a steam turbine, you should be fine with LP. Correct me if I got the numbers wrong, I tend to derp up with stuff like this...

And Retro is right, as always dire is doing a good job explaining this in detail...

 

[brandon706]

High pressure Boiler outputs twice amount of steam then Low pressure, but takes twice as long to reach maximum efficiency
2 High pressure blocks= Industrial Steam Engine 100% (8 Mj/t)
2 Low pressure blocks= Industrial Steam Engine 50% (4 Mj/t)

 

[Dafuq?]

Low pressure boiler is more efficient

If you have your boiler running all the time (which you should have), there is no difference in fuel-efficiency between HP and LP. HP takes longer to heat up, but once fully heated they are exactly equal in terms of efficiency.

 

[brandon706]

Ahh, That is awesome. I wish I knew that before setting up my system.I changed it so no one will get confused.

 

[silent assasin]

okay, i got a full picture now tnx guys

 

[Golrith]

Yep. Look at DW20's videos. Really answered my questions about boilers. Mine is powered by planks and charcoal from a steve's carts tree farm, and I was really shocked at how fast it ate my fuel, but now it's slowly built up to max temperature, fuel usage has dropped.
Reminds me of the RP blueletricity, bit of flux in power when new things added, but once it stabalises, it's nice and solid.

 

[Hydra]

You can of course always upgrade from a low-pressure to a high-pressure boiler if you swap out the boiler itself. The iron version is pretty cheap. If you take the room you need into account (you will need 18 industrial steam engines for a 36HP boiler, only 9 for an LP boiler) you can grow your boiler if you later on find out you need more power. And 144MJ is a LOT of power.

 

[Dafuq?]

Yeah 144 is really a lot of MJ, the 72 from the LP boiler are enough to power my quarry at full speed and all the machines that are running constantly (TE, Forestry) and then some. If I should ever need more I will hook up some combustion engines on biofuel for consumption peaks. No point in having a HP boiler running 24/7 and letting more than half of the steam go to waste most of the time. Only reason for me to upgrade to HP would be if I built a steam turbine.

 

[Hydra]

I personally use the excess to meld cobble into lava, burn that in a geothermal and create UU matter with that power.

 

[PCPuddin]

How many peat farms would I need to have a constant supply of peat to my LP boiler?

 

[Omicron]

Depends entirely on what size your boiler is.

 

[Hitmaniac]

To me, all that matters is how much supplies you have. You want a LOT of coal/biofuel/whatever to run a boiler. They take forever to heat up so you always want it on. Be careful on that because if it runs out of fuel it could explode.

 

[Zelfana]

Be careful on that because if it runs out of fuel it could explode.

Incorrect, the only way to blow up a boiler is to let it run out of water and then give it more water while it is still hot. If you have an Aqueous Accumulator with two water sources next to it directly under the boiler it will have enough water for any boiler.

 

[Golrith]

I personally use the excess to meld cobble into lava, burn that in a geothermal and create UU matter with that power.

Indeed, I'm making lava for a geo-therm generator for my EU power now. Since most of my IC machines are recyclers this is a nice cycle. The recyclers are being fed the crud from my quarry, if the quarry isn't running, then the recyclers don't need power, and I'm not wasting MJ converting it to EU.
Only down side at the moment is I need more engines attached to my boiler (only using 2 so not yet making full use of my boiler), my cells are draining, but I think they are starting to refill slowly now that the new MFE I placed has filled.

 

[Hydra]

I just feed cobble from an ignious extruder to my recyclers. Keeps them running 'forever'. Feels kinda cheaty actually, the system keeps creating UU-matter when I'm not online.

 

[Golrith]

Yeah, I've got one recycler using an extruder, just to provide me with a slow random trickle of goodies. Need to add an automated system to deal with minecarts and golden helmets. I'm getting a lot of them, bit annoying to keep manually dumping them into an alloy furnace for ingots manually all the time

 

[PCPuddin]

Depends entirely on what size your boiler is.

the max size

 

[Hydra]

Yeah, I've got one recycler using an extruder, just to provide me with a slow random trickle of goodies. Need to add an automated system to deal with minecarts and golden helmets. I'm getting a lot of them, bit annoying to keep manually dumping them into an alloy furnace for ingots manually all the time

Nice. I want something like too, just to get random crap from scrapboxes