Heating / Electricity incinerators

[Walta Gaming]

I am not sure if this has been brought up before but I am wondering how to properly use these buildings? In my current game I thought they would be great but I am really regreting building one. I had an electricity incinerator connected to a new construction area and the issue was it was only burning as much trash as it needed so I still had to export trash at my boarder post which was causing a jam. When I extended to electricity connection to a few oil pumps suddenly it started burning more trash then I could sort so I kept having blackouts in my construction area. I had to shut down my oil pumps to save the construction area which just sent me back to a position where I was exporting trash again.

Has anybody found a way to use these buildings correctly? It seems like you either need a giganic waste dump or build an incinerator first then have the generating incinerator as a backup. Other issue is trains are so slow to load waste it is really hard to integrate a generating incinerator into a network and the risk or running out of waste barely seems worth it. Maybe it's best to just play it safe and use coal as a fuel source since it does not cost much to produce and is much more reliable then burning waste.

Curious as to how others use these buildings or if they just skip them.

[gwahazar]

Maybe try to export electricity. Power plants are burning as much fuel as they need to produce energy needed.

[joeball123]

Incinerator power plants are useful for trash disposal if you hook them up to a foreign power connection that's set to export power. Other than that, these should be regarded more as power and heating plants that use a cheap fuel than as trash disposal options; they will only burn as much trash as is required to supply the connected demand.

For the most part, I skip them, though I'll consider building the incinerator power plant if I want to export power.

[Walta Gaming]

Oh of course I keep forgetting you can export power because the profit for doing so is so limited. Not worth it for regular power plants but if the trash is just getting burned anyways may as well make a bit of money off it. Much easier with those buildable foreign power connections as well. No need to rewire your starting power grid.

[Elessar_warrior]

Another option is to have then connected to a priority switch, and make it higher priority than the main source.

[Walta Gaming]

Originally posted by Elessar_warrior:

Another option is to have then connected to a priority switch, and make it higher priority than the main source.

Wow another great idea. I completely forgot about the priority switches. That's another thing I need to try.

[gwahazar]

I didn't tested it yet, but I guess Heat Incinerator is burning waste only in winter?

[Silent_Shadow]

Originally posted by gwahazar:

I didn't tested it yet, but I guess Heat Incinerator is burning waste only in winter?

Yep. They can go through a lot of waste though, so I wouldn't recommend building one without a good supply of waste or another heating plant.

[Walta Gaming]

Ouch my trash burning plant almost killed off an entire city. There was a machine replacement in my waste sorting plant right before winter so the substation connected to my heat exchanger cut out for several weeks. Lost over 1000 citizens in my new city. I have a real problem now since that electricity plant is connected to too many small buildings to double up on everything and my new incinerator facility is too far away for trains to manage all that extra distance. My current power plant does not have enough free connections and I really don't want to build and entire new power plant since I am going to move onto a new area soon.

100% next game I do the electricity plant is getting hooked up to an export connection and never for anything within my cities. Might also be a good idea to have a dump in front of any trash sorting facities because that machine replacement completely jammed all my waste trucks. The machine replacements really added a whole other layer of challanges to the game.

[gwahazar]

I checked it, Heat Incinerator is working also in July, when there was 30 degC.

[High King Lemur]

Heating plants work all throughout the year but during summer the heat output is marginal.

[nekys]

Don't rely on them for anything is what i will say. At 10% of power you will probably need more waste than you can produce. I use the power incinerator to get rid of waste and sell the generated power. A nice trick is to import hazardous waste, then burn it and sell the power for double profit, Never really used the heat producing one though, but in general they feel really unreliable.

[Silent_Shadow]

I think waste power should just be treated like renewable power. Pair it with a reliable power source and prioritize the waste power to minimize your fuel usage.

[kiky]

I use the heat incenerator and just mix it in with the coal heating plants of a big city with pumping stations. (which i needet anyway due to distance)
so if there is trash to burn it saves a little bit of coal, if not, houses still stay warm.

[Pr0wn]

You can also import hazardous waste for a profit, burn it and export the electricity