Heat Exchangers not producing steam.. ?

[tranks]

heyhey,

my heat exchangers arent producing any steam, even though they are maintained with heat greater than 500 and the water is filled too. its like 40% aint working. the rest magically works in the same row.

i have no clue whats wrong. tried to scrap and rebuild the heat pipes, but it didnt work, added more water pipes... nothing worked. its my first power plant.

screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/r25FR


thanks in advance :)

[ZionsAlliance]

try adding more offshore pumps those will help mantain water in the pipes something else you could do would be try adding a few tanks to measure amounts of water and last be not least you could try and prevent backflow and use the small and normal pump in the direction you need the water

[impetus_maximus]

it looks like all the steam is being consumed.

[KatherineOfSky]

For 4 reactors, you need 5 offshore pumps... and 5 independent pipes leading to your HEs. (Trying to shove all the water into 2 pipes won't work as there is a throughput limit)

[Hedning]

You have way more offshore pumps than you need. One heat exchenger only consumes 103 water/second. The way you set it up the bottleneck will be the pipes themselves rather than the pumps, however that doesn't matter with this few heat exchangers.

I see nothing wrong in the picture. Are you thinking the heat exchanger you have selected in the picture is not working? because it is. The steam is just flowing away from it as soon as it is produced. Are not all your steam turbines working? If they are not you may either have too few heat exchangers, or you have too many turbines taking steam from the same pipe.

[Zaflis]

I don't see real issue in the screenshot. Reactors already are 2x2 with neighbour bonuses, and they all seem to be connected to heat and water. But if you want to improve water flow:

Water pumps -> Tank -> Electric pump -> piping...

1 electric pump can keep up with rate of roughly 10 water pumps if i recall, so at least you don't need to have pump and waterpump flows in parallel. That's actually just odd.

But weren't nuclear reactors supposed to heat higher than 500? It's been a while since i played with them.

[Hedning]

Originally posted by Zaflis:

1 electric pump can keep up with rate of roughly 10 water pumps if i recall, so at least you don't need to have pump and waterpump flows in parallel. That's actually just odd.

While one pump may be able to keep up the pipe after the pump will not. Capacity drops very quickly for the first few pipes. A rule of thumb is to never assume more than 1200 water flow (an offshore pump) in pipes unless you have extremely short ones. At 4 pipes you are already below 2k flow.

[KatherineOfSky]

Originally posted by Zaflis:

1 electric pump can keep up with rate of roughly 10 water pumps if i recall, so at least you don't need to have pump and waterpump flows in parallel. That's actually just odd.

Not sure where you got those numbers from, but in 0.15, small pumps and offshore pumps pump at exactly the same rate: 1200 fluid/s. Putting small pumps on the line definitely won't improve flow.

[Zaflis]

https://wiki.factorio.com/Offshore_pump

It produces 1200 units of water per second.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Pump

Pumps can move 200 units of fluid per tick, or 12000 per second.

Values are same ingame, but i can agree with pipes being a bottleneck to it. Fluid wagon pumped into tank however...

[KatherineOfSky]

Originally posted by Zaflis:

https://wiki.factorio.com/Offshore_pump

It produces 1200 units of water per second.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Pump

Pumps can move 200 units of fluid per tick, or 12000 per second.

Values are same ingame, but i can agree with pipes being a bottleneck to it. Fluid wagon pumped into tank however...

Thanks for the correction. I was under the impression they were the same. I recall reading an FFF where the devs planned to make the values the same, to simplify calculations, but I guess they must have changed their minds.

[Warlord]

Is perhaps the offshore pump info not updated for the 10x increase in fluid numbers?

[Hedning]

Originally posted by Warlord:

Is perhaps the offshore pump info not updated for the 10x increase in fluid numbers?

The offshore pump was definitely buffed. In 0.12 (the version I played most) it was 60 per second.
Also previously regular pumps could be bottlenecks in your pipe system, which didn't feel right. Maybe they buffed pumps further so that wouldn't happen?

[teravisor]

I see 28 heat exchangers.
4 reactors, each with 2 neighbours give 12 raw reactor power.
Rate was somewhere about 1:4:7 iirc, so at least you're missing 20 heat exchangers for perfect ratio (about same as you have right now, so it's a huge lack).
I bet your reactors are 1000 temp (can't get any more), aren't cooling because you simply don't have enough exchangers and wasting fuel because you run them full-time.
Also, as they said above, your water piping is awful. If you slap more exchangers now, you might run out of water (there are no signs of that on screenshot though). Rule of thumb is to never connect two lines of pipes leading from a tank/pump together if you need throughput. And you connected everything you could.

[tranks]

Originally posted by teravisor:

I see 28 heat exchangers.
4 reactors, each with 2 neighbours give 12 raw reactor power.
Rate was somewhere about 1:4:7 iirc, so at least you're missing 20 heat exchangers for perfect ratio (about same as you have right now, so it's a huge lack).
I bet your reactors are 1000 temp (can't get any more), aren't cooling because you simply don't have enough exchangers and wasting fuel because you run them full-time.
Also, as they said above, your water piping is awful. If you slap more exchangers now, you might run out of water (there are no signs of that on screenshot though). Rule of thumb is to never connect two lines of pipes leading from a tank/pump together if you need throughput. And you connected everything you could.

exactly, i connected everything i could. wasnt sure about the outcome. i have played like 40-50 hours in factorio so far, playing with a couple mods that make the wildlife harder and giving me mk1-mk5 laser turrets and some cool vehicles and better personal equipment (bobs)

anyway, i think that ive done 2 things wrong.

1st: as you nice people told me, ive fked up the water connections. will try to solve that on weekend.

2nd: the steam pipes leading to the turbines (they are also connected to 10 oil refineries producing oil stuff from cole, but i think that doesnt matter much).



on the efficiency note im doing so much wrong in wasting nuclear pods feeding the reactors permanently. but im still learing the game. i will do it more efficient as soon as i get the basics :D

seeing the lets plays from people expanding their base automaticly via "greygoo mod" and ... well, im not geting the basics straight yet.


anyway, loving the game <3