Water evaporates in 1.0?

[Jeff]

When I first started playing satisfactory a couple weeks after it started and got to tier 7, I started working on the aluminum factory. When it make the aluminum scrap, it also outputs water too.. Tried just feeding it into the alumina refinery and it stopped up the system. When I went online and asked how to get rid of it, I got several answers.

Today I did what I tried long ago (putting it back into the system, but this time, I ran it into an Industrial Fluid Buffer, then to a water tower 10 stories high, then back into the same pipe that feeds water into the alumina refinery. The water in the buffer started going down and now that 2,400 m/3 is now 800, Where did the water go?

[McCloud]

Yes.

[Evilsod]

How do you think a coal generator works?

[Zulban]

Pretty sure water shouldn't be evaporating in your pipes (and if it did it would just be in your pipes still, just as a gas, and that's not modeled in this game), only used up in machines. I've not built a large-scale aluminum factory but when I was just running the basic system and looped the water back into itself I did so using a valve on the primary input and set the extractors to only extract what I needed. You can try setting the flow rate on the valve itself but I read that it's not very accurate and you might get more or less flow than what's actually listed because of floating point errors.

[sortulf]

The water pumps stops outputing water because the water from the water tower has higher pressure.
When you didn't have the tower, the water pumps had higher pressure than the refinery.

[Jeff]

Okay, but what got me is as soon as I fed the water into the pipe at the beginning refinery, the water level in the buffer tank dropped a lot. So where did the water go? Try it some time.

[Nu_Gundam]

So pipes don't work as if they're always fully pressurized, which is what I think you're expecting from them... This means that the flow isn't always one way, and won't always be consistent as with conveyor belts.

If you're into reading guides:
https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/images/3/39/Pipeline_Manual.pdf

Otherwise, try slapping on those pumps as a band-aid solution (and focus on maximizing your flow rates, which means full pressure, which means full efficiency).

[God of Snacks]

I always suggest not looping systems back but rather looping them forward. That is to say, use leftover water from your aluminum refineries to power other aluminum refineries in their own little closed circuit.

[Nu_Gundam]

Looping back works fine for me in every stage of the game, but I also implement pipes without unnecessary changes in elevations and avoiding other variables which may affect their flow rates.

I'm 100% certain that his layout was designed with fully pressurized pipes in mind but without actually fully pressurizing those pipes.