Using small pumps: pump jack to refinery, water?

[valenti_scott]

Hello-
There have been a lot of great postings about small pumps, but I am still not quite clear on a couple simple things:

Say I have an oil-processing facility set up, with several pump jacks set up, all feeding a single refinery. The pump jacks are pretty close, with the furthest about twenty tiles from the refinery.

So would a small pump increase the flow of crude oil in this instance? And if I decide to use small pump(s) is one enough? If just one, where would it go, right at the entrance to the refinery?

Also, are pumps ever needed with pipes containing water?

Thanks.
-Scott

[Jupiter3927]

Those electric pumps you put on pipes are only really useful for high capacity pipelines.
It won't make much of a difference on a line only 20 tiles long.

[valenti_scott]

OK, thanks.

[AlexMBrennan]

single refinery

Without mods a single refinery consumes 2 liquid per second. You don't have to worry about the liquid throughput issues (which is "fixed" by small pumps) until you go above 60 liquid/s.

However, for large factories this may become an issue if you have a central oil unloading station connect to dozens of refineries.

Also, are pumps ever needed with pipes containing water?

You only need pumps for water if you want to connect more than ten steam engines to a single pipe for some reason.
Given that pipes and boilers are incredibly cheap whilst pumps are expensive (and require power) there really isn't much point.

[obstructor]

Basically fluids work like this:

The longer the pipe the less that can flow through it. Pretty much assume the pipe will deliever 90 fluid per second, it doesn't get any slower until it passes through 224 pipe segments (undergound pipes only count as 2 units regardless of length).

If you need more flow than that you need pumps. The primary use for pumps in the vanilla game is controlling where the fluid goes moreso than increasing the pressure. Although attaching them directly to a storage tank will drain it much faster.

So you would want to attach the pump to the storage area to force the fluids into the refinery pipes instead of bouncing around in other pipes and storage tanks. But really this only helps in one situation, Your tanks are running low but you aren't out, if the tanks are out no amount of pumping is going to solve the problem, if your tanks are full the fluid is already going to flow rapidly.

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

You only need pumps for water if you want to connect more than ten steam engines to a single pipe for some reason.

You can attach 20 steam engines to one pipe, but it will still need two offshore pumps, as long as your pipe doesn't exceed 14 units from pump to boilers and boilers to steam engines.

But good luck getting it any faster, one pipe should be able to run 25 steam engines if you don't use more than 4 pipe segments and somehow get enough offshore pumps in there. Perhaps pumps directly into boilers running parrallel to the shore attached directly into the steam engines, that might get you all the way to maximum flow of 240 fluids per tick as you won't be using a single pipe. Running a massive 40 steam engines.

[Name Lips]

Once your oil field is exhausted, it will be producing .1 oil per second. No amount of small pumps will ever get more than .1 oil per second to your refinery.

I like small pumps more for the fact that they work as one-way valves than because of any kind of pressure increase. At least with a small pump, you don't have to worry about oil in a holding tank flowing backwards and trying to fill up the pipes behind it.

[Dux]

What you will find is that you need to do some research as I found this game to have a lot of stats and numbers as the guys above are showing. A bit of math is needed and knowing what they will do. I use them to push oil in a direction of flow. Know the flow with F4 key and scroll down to "Show_fluid_box_fluid_info" click on the white box "X" and that should show the flow.

I use the pump in a field of like 6 to 10 oil spots off the pumps to take a little and push it to make more. Now the pumps will only give a max and over time will dim down to almost nothing but will always give something.

[Roxor128]

About the only thing I've ever found myself using small pumps for is with the circuit network to only enable cracking when I have more than a certain amount of heavy or light oil in storage.

Connect a stoage tank for, say heavy oil, with a circuit network wire (perhaps via a few intermediate power poles), to a small pump leading into your heavy-to-light-oil cracking branch's input. Set the pump's enabled condition to "heavy oil > 1000", and you'll only have heavy oil getting sent for cracking if you have more than 1000 in storage, allowing you to keep some around for making lubricant (or in my case for the Burguis (sp?) Process, given the mod I was using).

If using a universal barreling mod (or v0.15 when it comes out), you can do something similar with the logistics network. You'll just be setting it in terms of barrels of whatever liquid instead.