What am I doing wrong with the room temperature?

[Gildongs]

I have triple doors, double walls, cooler set to -28C and the room still heats up to teens degrees. help!

Only thing I can think of is that there's a number of people going into here several times a day to haul new food into it. But I'm constantly short on food so I keep harvesting and having to put food into the storage. Not to mention people going in there several times a day to pick up food to eat.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2245994822

[Slye_Fox]

What's the outside temp?

[Gildongs]

40C

[Razor 2.3]

If it's not cold enough, you don't have enough cooling. If you don't have enough cooling, add more coolers.

[Slye_Fox]

Originally posted by Gildongs:

40C

The thing with coolers is that they can't cool if the exaust side is too hot.
I don't think 40C is too much for that, but I think it's towards the upper limit.
You might have to stick more coolers in.

[HunterSilver]

Coolers can only exchange so much heat from one room to the next. If the outside ambient temperature is trying to heat your 11x11 room to 40c, one cooler is not going to be able to fight that on its own. Like everyone else said, add more coolers to increase how much heat is being removed from the room.

[Diarmuhnd]

You have 3 problems that I can see.

1st: inadequate insulation, 3 tiles for maximum insulation. That includes corners

2nd: you only have 1 small corridor acting as an airlock, also with zero insulation protection which makes it almost useless as an airlock.

3rd: High traffic & high heat areas need more than 1 wall cooler to keep the temp colder

Note 1: the more traffic your cold storage gets the larger your airlock should be. And for very high temperatures outdoors investing in a double airlock is recommended.

note 2: i have mild summers so I only needed 1 layer for my airlock, if it was as hot as you get I would be using 2 layers. Building rooms around your freezer will help insulate it. It also helps to keep those adjacent rooms next to the cold storage cooler.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2243398547
the kitchen and cold storage is located in the bottom left.


You can look at my Rimworld screenshots, i have pics of a few bases, almost all of them show my cold storage and kitchens. Sometimes I make my kitchens inside research rooms, sometimes i don't. But I always insulate them, either with layers of walls, or layers of rooms.

Good luck, let me how it goes.

[Slye_Fox]

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

3 tiles for maximum insulation.

2 walls are all you need, a 3rd layer adds negligible if any insulation.

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

That includes corners

Heat is only transferred orthogonally, so corners have no effect on insulation.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

1st: inadequate insulation, 3 tiles for maximum insulation. That includes corners

There is 0 difference between 2 thick insulation and 3 thick.

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

2nd: you only have 1 small corridor acting as an airlock, also with zero insulation protection which makes it almost useless as an airlock.

Any coldness that escapes into the airlock is lost, the point is only to have a small area for that coldness to leak into, how quickly that airlock normalizes in temperature afterward doesn't matter. So insulating your airlock doesn't really do anything noticeable.

Everything about their freezer is perfectly fine, it's just too large for one cooler to handle on a 40C map.

[Diarmuhnd]

Originally posted by Slye_Fox:

Originally posted by Gildongs:

40C

The thing with coolers is that they can't cool if the exaust side is too hot.
I don't think 40C is too much for that, but I think it's towards the upper limit.
You might have to stick more coolers in.

This is wrong.

Having high temperatures on the exhaust side does not limit cooling on the cold side.

Roofing the exhaust side will do that because the heat does not get released outdoors and the heat will build up, thus heating the adjacent rooms back up.

[Diarmuhnd]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

1st: inadequate insulation, 3 tiles for maximum insulation. That includes corners

There is 0 difference between 2 thick insulation and 3 thick.

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

2nd: you only have 1 small corridor acting as an airlock, also with zero insulation protection which makes it almost useless as an airlock.

Any coldness that escapes into the airlock is lost, the point is only to have a small area for that coldness to leak into, how quickly that airlock normalizes in temperature afterward doesn't matter. So insulating your airlock doesn't really do anything noticeable.

Everything about their freezer is perfectly fine, it's just too large for one cooler to handle on a 40C map.

the point is, if the airlock is hot then its useless.
and 3 tiles is the thickeness i use for zero problems all the time. so i say 3
Welp I was very wrong, guess my mind is playing tricks on me. 2 layers is fine... unless they get blown up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUNAs5aTww0
edit: plus the answer the OP chose as an answer is wrong sorta .. so ... yeah

whatever

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

the point is, if the airlock is hot then its useless.

The airlock is always going to be roughly the same temperature because you aren't actively cooling it. Insulating it or not is just going to change the time it takes to return to that baseline temperature after the cold air from the open freezer door has leaked into it, which really doesn't matter.

A "hot" airlock is not useless, or less useful. The point of an airlock is to create a very tiny space for the freezer to attempt to equalize temperature with during the moment the door is open. If the room on the other side of the door is a 10x10 and your freezer is 10x10 a lot more of the cold temperature will be lost while the door is open. Using a 1x1 or 1x2 airlock means a very tiny space is being equalized which results in much less temperature loss.

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

This is wrong.

Having high temperatures on the exhaust side does not limit cooling on the cold side.

Roofing the exhaust side will do that because the heat does not get released outdoors and the heat will build up, thus heating the adjacent rooms back up.

No. Coolers do have an efficiency which decreases based on the temperature of the exhaust side. Essentially they pump air from the red side, cool that air down and feed it into the blue side, and radiate the heat generated during the process back to the red side. The hotter the red side the less efficient they work at cooling the blue side. 40C however is not really hot enough for the effect to be that noticeable, the difference between a 10C exhaust side and a 40C exhaust side is like 1 degree or less in efficiency per cooler.

[Diarmuhnd]

My airlocks are never the same temp as the outside nor the cooler, it is a buffer between the two. A hot airlock in a high traffic area is not doing its job good enough. Especially with only 1 wall cooling unit.

As for cooler efficiency, we can't control the outdoor temp, nor is the difference in temperature impactfully, so its not the reason the OP was having problems with his cold storage.