Understanding vents and using them cleverly?

[pretorian]

I reckon I'm not using vents correctly or I have misunderstood how they work. In my six room living area, I have four heaters and vents to spread the heat so I didn't have to put a heater in each room. Now at this current moment, there is a cold snap so basically, only the rooms with heaters are warm enough. The other rooms are not. My layout is in the screen shot below.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/947338126999150474/D44F5D9FD96FE016E1E831F565C29DBB107D37B1/

Have I completely missed the point of vents? I thought it was supposed to be an effective way to spread heat evenly, but it seems you might as well just put one in each room. You are still goin to need more during extreme cold (and heat for air conditioning). Or should I have built a dedicated "heater room" with nothing but heaters and connect vents from there? Either way, I can't understand what vents really are good for insteead of just supplying every room with a heater and AC unit.

[Vintorez]

You're correct, they equalize temperatures between the two sides. But during a cold snap they may struggle to keep up, especially with colonist's opening doors to get in and out.

A good way to test how many you need in your weather conditions is to close off vents and open them one at a time to see how much space one heater can maintain. But as I said, every time a door is opened you will lose some heat. Double thick walls also insulate better.

[Myriad]

That should be plenty of heaters for that little space. It must be a 'very cold' snap. You lose a lot of heat through the walls. If you had double thick walls, you could probably even get away with two heaters in that space.

Edit: Looking again, you also have every door leading outside. Doors act like lesser vents when opened. If it's -40C outside, and set for 20C inside, the temperature will try to equalize at -10C. Again, double 'exterior' walls would prevent that.

If your insistent on leaving all your doors on the outside, instead of having a hallway in the middle, then airlock your doors, which basically means door-space-door, to prevent heat loss.

[elipod]

Single walls transmit heat between rooms even without vents, vents make it faster, but not perfect. You have many walls coonecting with outdoors which explains big leak, even when doors are closed.

If I were to improve insulation in this layout, I'd turn inner passages between structures into corridors, connecting everything into single structure.

This video gives some insight on how temperature works. It was made for alpha 16, but still relevant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtPwe5hDGBM

Best way to figure them out, is to experiment in dev mode and try out different configurations.

[pretorian]

How much does temperature dissipate through vents regarding distance from the source? Does it differ if I have my “heating room” at the far end as opposed to in the middle?

[Myriad]

It makes no difference where you put the heaters in a room. If you have a room the size of a football field and you place all heaters in one corner, the temperature at the far corner will be exactly the same, and all vents will equalize, equally.

Edit: If you mean the far end of your colony, venting through multiple rooms in a row, then no, it won't be very effective.

But if you have one long hallway that you heat, and every room has a direct vent to that hallway, then everything will equalize the same, regardless of where you place the heaters.

[simon]

As has already been stated you need to have the doors open onto a corridors or you will lose too much heat when the toons go in and out.

[Cloud Breaker]

A few cool tricks that helped me out in the colder biomes is doing small walled court yards that you can quickly put a ceiling on and you utilize these around your power planets, coolers, anything that generates heat, and you make sure every room is interlinked with vents and you can control the flow of heat. Very useful.

[pretorian]

So basically what affects it is number of entrances to the open wild and number of "jumps" from the source? Where each vent and room the air passes through dampens it's effect somewhat?

[Myriad]

Doors act like walls, so the number of entrances shouldn't matter. Theoretically surrounding an exterior room with nothing but double doors should be the same as surrounding it with double walls. Doors only make a difference when they open. So a high traffic entrance would vent heat outside, whereas a double door that's never used wouldn't.

And if you had a chain of rooms connected by vents, each successive room would be that much colder than the ones closest to the heated room. Each room tries to equalize it's temperature according to the temperature of the surrounding rooms.

So a linear pattern might look like this:
Heater 20C---vent--15C--vent--10C--vent--5C--outside 0C.

Now depending on the rate that heat escapes through walls and ceilings, which I don't know, it's possible to eventually equalize that last room to 16C+.

[Borkins]

If I may make a recommendation that would only take a minor bit of construction:
bring each room's long, shared wall in by 1 tile, so you end up creating a hallway lengthwise between all rooms of one tile wide. Then on one end, add your AC unit, and place your two heaters in that hallway. On the other end of the hallway, add two doors in sequence.

The way you have it now, as heat generates in the two right rooms, it trickles across to the next two, but with some heat loss. Then the same to get to the far two. If anything, have one heater on the exact opposite corner so that heat is spread from both ends.

If you have a hallway though it makes it easier to maintain temperature equally

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