Air Conditioners and Room Pressure

[Enorats]

I've finally set up my first greenhouse. This is good, as I am out of food and those seed potatoes were starting to look mighty yummy.

Unfortunately, the sun has warmed my greenhouse to 26 degrees and rising. I knew this was going to happen, and set up an air conditioner with attached water coolant pipes/radiators pressurized to a few hundred kpa. An active vent draws air into the pipes leading to the AC unit, and a passive pipe lets it back out.

When I turn the AC unit on though, the pressure in my room absolutely plummets. At first I assumed this was normal, as it had to fill the pipes right? Thing is though, the base is quite large (I sorta went more than a little overkill, it's like 50+ blocks in volume) and the pipes aren't all that extensive.

Am I doing something horribly wrong here? Is there a reason my AC unit seems to be devouring my atmosphere and leaving my irreplaceable potatoes on the verge of wilting? Do I need to put some sort of a pressure regulator on the active vent to make it not want to draw the whole room's atmo in all at once?

[Enorats]

Oh good god, that's exactly what is happening. The pipes leading to the blasted AC unit's input are sitting at like 8 MPa. Bloody hell. The AC unit barely processes gas compared to the vent's ability to suck it in. In 5 minutes running with the active vent off it's only dropped like .1 MPa.

I don't get it though. I can't place a back pressure regulator directly onto a vent.. and the vent will just overpressurize and burst any pipe attached to it if I place a regulator farther down the line. How is this even supposed to work?

Edit: Thankfully a portable air conditioner hooked into a tank connector and my radiator pipeline appears to have staved off the oncoming potato extinction. Now I'm stuck babysitting batteries X_X

[Heightmare]

The alternative is to connect a power connector, but then you'll be stuck having to babysit the gas contents. Depending on what planet you're on this may be easier though.

[Enorats]

Am I doing something wrong with the AC unit itself though? The non portable one?

The wiki shows a simple diagram with an active vent on the input, passive on the output, and radiator covered pipe to vent heat on the waste output. That's what I made, but the AC unit can't process even a tiny fraction of the active vent's input.

With a passive vent on both ends it doesn't really work. Maybe passive vents on both ends, but a volume pump on between the AC output and output passive vent? Will it pull gas through the AC unit? Does the AC unit just do that itself?

Edit: Okay, so after a bit of testing the AC unit does seem to act as a pump on its own. Placing a volume pump between the output and output vent, then turning it off, led to the pipe between the AC unit and pump being pressurized beyond the room's pressure. Turning it on led to no improvement whatsoever. So.. it seems to be working? I just don't get why the portable unit can cool the room but the regular one doesn't seem to have any impact whatsoever.. they're using the exact same radiator system, so it's not heat transfer that's the issue.

[Hate Bear]

The A/C will pull into it's associated pipe network. I think it's much easier to have it connected to some pipes (maybe with radiators, if you want to get rid of the heat faster) outside. The A/C unit doesn't cool the air by itself. It just pulls it, so you definitely don't want a passive vent anywhere on that system.

I personally favor a pressure regulator (you can do an active vent, too) on the other end of the base from the stuff pulling out (like your A/C). You will want the pressure regulator on the other end set to something like 100kpa and then just keep it on when running base atmo. Have it fed by some clean base atmo--whatever you can come up with.

The other unit that isn't portable is a power hog. I wouldn't mess with it for a while if I were you.

[Hate Bear]

Personally, I wound up connecting that A/C line outside to the same inputs back into my filtration system as the furnace out (although I separated them outside because it would be insane not to). So, basically you wind up looping gas that gets pulled at some point. Just getting more gas is really helpful, too, so you can keep pressure in your A/C line and other lines outside and not have to worry about enough clean base atmo. It's also more efficient because you're running higher pressures through the filters and you don't have to do it all at one time (on the filtration you no doubt have or will have for base air).

But yeah, you're doing all right if you hooked up the portable A/C. You don't really have to hook up the portable filter in the early game, but you can if you want to use it more when you get a bigger base.

Depending on how much air there is outside the hab you might want to spam radiators on that cooling line, especially if you get a lot of heat generating processes in there. The colder that outside line is, the more effective all your coolers are. It takes a lot of radiators if you have no air or very little air outside where you put the line.

[Enorats]

I'm on the moon, and my water coolant line is at like -16 degrees in the day and -75 at night. Easily plenty cool. These non-portable atmospheric kit A/C units just don't seem to be very effective at all. I've installed two of them now trying to see if maybe they're just weaker than the portable one. Those two still are now ever so slowly managing to cool my base without the help of the portable unit, but it's still a LOT slower than the portable.

I think I know why now though. They're pumping out gas at whatever temperature they're set to - set them at 20 degrees and they won't keep the room at 20 degrees, they just put out 20 degree air. That won't cool a room that's 30 degrees by all that much, and might not even keep up with the sun's heat. After setting both to -99 they dropped my temperature from 35 to 23 in the time it took to write this. Maybe I just need to set them to something like 0 or -10 so they manage to actually keep a stable 20.

[TinMan]

The A/C units didn't work properly back when I tried them (and they could use an enormous amount of power), not sure if this is the case currently. So instead I used a combination of logic units and wall coolers (and/or heaters if you need them) as per this guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1282271581. It worked very well once I got things setup & tested. The hard part is determining how many wall coolers/piping & radiators you'll need in total if its a big area. If you go that route, I'd plan on putting the temp sensor in the middle of the room so it's as accurate as possible. You can always test it in the creator mode.

[jon.jps]

I have a greenhouse that is 9X9X2 and I have 3 wall coolers with piping that leads outside and loops around one side of the greenhouse and back in with radiators all along the outside piping. Its a closed loop filled with water and other air types. They are hooked up to logic and thermostat so they kick on when temp rises too high and turns off when it gets too low. While they take some time to cool down the greenhouse they are still fairly effective at it and I no longer worry about temperature at all in my greenhouse. The only real maintenance that needs to be done is power and I have a string of 10 solar panels and a battery dedicated to just that room for lighting and the coolers.