What does YOUR Power Room look like?

[Kyonai]

Just a post for you guys to show off where the core of your operations go down, the real heart of everybody's world polluting headquarters of Minecraftia. To begin, I'll introduce my Boiler room. In complete disregard for that first sentence, it's run by two tree farms supplying fermenters with Saplings to produce Biomass, and then stilled in to Biofuel, which is then burned by my hulking 3x3x5 Liquid Fueled, High Pressure Steam Boiler, producing all of my base's power. I compacted my design as much as I could while still allowing for walk-around room and space behind the machines for inevitable maintenance and expansion.

EDIT: I realize this isn't a very descriptive shot, I just wanted to show the messy load of main pipe lines that keeps my base operational. If anyone would like to see any additional angles I'd be happy to oblige.

 

[NosajDraw]

My power room

Max current output 100MJ/t

Lava is pumped in from BC pumps located at lava pools beneath the power room, suplimented by lava generators from Thermal Exchange (TE) which are fed with nether rack.

All the engines are lava engines from TE and in the absence of some good Redpower solutions are all individually switched by levers, what you can't see tucked behind the lava generators is 10 TE power cells.

 

[Kyonai]

Very nice and neat looking. I have a feeling I should switch over to the TE power cells and conduits, but I like the good old fashioned look of that massive blue energy line running through the BC energy pipes

 

[NosajDraw]

Yeah, I miss the blue laser light stuff but TE is so much more efficient, and actually allows me to run a BC/TE power grid and when I need EU power, I just convert right there at the machine that needs it.

Have always previously done it the other way around because of the problems with BC energy management.

 

[Kyonai]

How do you convert to EU directly from MJ if you don't mind me asking? Probably something I completely glanced over and disregarded in mistake...

 

[NosajDraw]

Oh I added this mod http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1564850-144-minefactory-rl-nether-ores-power-converters/ as the lack of EU/MJ converters in FTB seemed very silly to me.

 

[Kyre]

How do you convert to EU directly from MJ if you don't mind me asking? Probably something I completely glanced over and disregarded in mistake...

The Electrical Engine from Forestry will allow you to directly convert EU to MJ.

 

[NosajDraw]

Sure, but I have lots of MJ and no EU so not a great help to me.

 

[Kyre]

Sure, but I have lots of MJ and no EU so not a great help to me.

Ah, sorry, I misread your post. The first thing that comes to mind is using Thermal Expansion's Magma Crucible to create lava, which you then put into an IC2 Geothermal Generator - but I don't think the ratio of MJ to EU is very good.

An alternative that probably would work better would be to use several Forestry machines. If you say that you have tons of MJ, then you can easily power an Arboretum, place the saplings into a Fermenter to make Biomass, which you then can put into a still to make Biofuel. Biofuel when placed in a Bio Generator will output 16 EU/t. Additionally, you can burn the wood generated from the arboretum into Charcoal in Thermal Expansion's Powered Furnace, and then you can burn the charcoal in a basic IC2 generator. Simple!

 

[SilvasRuin]

Additionally, you can burn the wood generated from the arboretum into Charcoal in Thermal Expansion's Powered Furnace, and then you can burn the charcoal in a basic IC2 generator. Simple!

Or throw in a third extremely simple power "grid" and use Factorization's practically free (minus crafting costs) Furnace Heater in place of the Powered Furnace. Enough mirrors and batteries set up for it, and Factorization stuff should never run out of power unless the weather decides it loathes you.

I wouldn't recommend it with GregTech's more prohibitive recipe, but one could go completely grid-less and use a Solar Panel, Batbox, and Electrical Engine for each Forestry Farm and keep each component of your extended network autonomous.

 

[NosajDraw]

An alternative that probably would work better would be to use several Forestry machines. If you say that you have tons of MJ, then you can easily power an Arboretum, place the saplings into a Fermenter to make Biomass, which you then can put into a still to make Biofuel. Biofuel when placed in a Bio Generator will output 16 EU/t. Additionally, you can burn the wood generated from the arboretum into Charcoal in Thermal Expansion's Powered Furnace, and then you can burn the charcoal in a basic IC2 generator. Simple!

Sure, there are a large number of ways to generate EU, but I hate running multiple power grids throughout my base, so having chosen to go the TE route because I'd not done that before, what I wanted was an easy way to convert MJ to EU that could be done right at the point at which EU was needed.

Really, all these multiple, incompatible power systems really annoy me, technically (in game and code wise) Ellorams Bluetricity is probably the best system, but its so low powered as to be useless for driving say 30 macerators and 20 furnaces all at the same time, EU power generation I've done to death in many guises, MJ I had given a go before, but always found its "wires" and always on nature of machines and the bizzare levels of it required to run forestry machines a huge problem. TE cures most of those problems, so I build a 100MJ power station, with room (and lava capacity already in place) to take that to 400MJ should I ever need that much (30 macerators and 20 furnaces all at the same time will probably do it).

 

[Omicron]

It's amazing how much power you guys consume. My base's power station is far, far smaller.

I have two hobbyist steam engines running charcoal attached directly to a redstone energy cell. That's 3.2 MJ/t, and it's more than I can use up at any given time. I have six TE machines, five Forestry machines and a Railcraft rolling machine attached to the output, which get used on demand only.

The charcoal is provided by two coke ovens - which will produce 6 charcoal in the time it takes the engines to consume 4, so I have plenty charcoal leftover to throw into the single generator powering my IC2 machines, though I barely use these right now (mostly I compress coal into diamonds and centrifuge pyrite dust for iron). The two coke ovens in turn are fed by a Forestry tree farm which lies inactive most of the time because its output is far higher than the ovens can process it.

On the side I am producing a little biofuel whenever I have apples to juice, and the coke ovens have already generated half a Railcraft tank of creosote oil which I could also burn. But really, I'm fine on charcoal alone.

Obviously this will change once I get something really hungry going, like a quarry or a massfab. Unfortunately a quarry requires steel, which requires a blast furnace, which requires slime balls. And I've never seen a single slime all game long. So for the time being, I am still mining by hand... I may set up a massfab sometime just to get slimeballs. That leaves the question of how to power it, of course. Can't use a steam turbine since I have no steel, and the biopower generator's efficiency is atrocious (burns 200,000 MJ to generate 32,000 EU). I suppose the Magma Crucible is the best bet - even running on cobblestone it will trade MJ to EU on a 1:1 basis, and using Netherrack is far more favorable (even though I already nerfed that conversion hard in my personal config ). Also if I have excess tin, I can upgrade the value of a bucket of lava from 20,000 EU to 50,000 EU by putting it into an IC2 tin cell.

 

[Pinkishu]

Or throw in a third extremely simple power "grid" and use Factorization's practically free (minus crafting costs) Furnace Heater in place of the Powered Furnace. Enough mirrors and batteries set up for it, and Factorization stuff should never run out of power unless the weather decides it loathes you.

I wouldn't recommend it with GregTech's more prohibitive recipe, but one could go completely grid-less and use a Solar Panel, Batbox, and Electrical Engine for each Forestry Farm and keep each component of your extended network autonomous.

Oh please, the recipe is so easy to make...

 

[SilvasRuin]

I can't say I like waiting on the centrifuge to produce needed components. I suppose it would probably help if I fed it sand instead of clay, but the clay seems more profitable to me and helps get rid of the absurd amounts of sludge I accumulate. Maybe I'm a little too obsessed with profit and efficiency in this case and not enough with convenience and expedience.

 

[Omicron]

But the clay centrifuge recipe takes all of 50 seconds, so even a single centrifuge will churn out one panel's worth of cells in just over one and a half minutes. Just dump in a full stack while you go mine for a bit?

Remember that with AdvancedSolars, upgrading your panels does no longer require ridiculous amounts of lower tier panels. You can make a single panel and upgrade it all the way to ultimate if you have the necessary resources. So there's no need to wait on your centrifuge to produce you 1024 silicon cells.

 

[SilvasRuin]

You're right. I'm probably just blaming GregTech out of bias for the tedium of making clay with Factorization. I rescind my solar panel statement.

 

[Meldiron]

You'r looking at 72 maintainance free MJ/t.
It doesn't require refueling (it's selfrefueling), it's relatively small (the closest magma crusible cluster isn't a part of the power generation, it's just my on request lava production, the 4 in the back are all that's needed to keep it warm).
Trying my best to use up all that power but it's turning out to be hard.
Next stop is a no fuel boiler producing 100EU/T!

(also, what happened to the thumbnail feature?)

 

[SilvasRuin]

What is the fuel in that setup, a Forestry farm?

 

[Meldiron]

Lava buckets filled by magma crucibles powered by the boiler itself (it consumes half of the 144MJ/T production to keep it heated)

 

[SilvasRuin]

Ah, I misread and thought you meant all the magma crucibles weren't part of the power generation.