Fuel to use for boiler??

[jesselk122]

I can hand feed bio fuel, so i set up a 18/min bio fuel station thing, but that still doesn't keep up with production for just 2 boilers.
How do you guys go about feeding the boilers for high power??
Thanks!

[JimboTCB]

Biofuel production from greenhouses isn't supposed to be used for power generation, it straight up tells you in the tooltip that it costs more energy than it produces.

Ignium rubble is the first thing you should be using, and honestly there's not much point using any other fuel sources as they're a hell of a lot more effort for not much additional gain.

[Phoenix Cat]

I used portable fuel. I save my ignium for other things. I have 24 steam turbines running and lots of power. It's not that difficult to make the stuff. You should start out with ignium though and transition as fast as you can. That's IMO. Sometimes ore patches are hard to come by. So I like to use mine for something other than just burning.

[wkitty42]

Ignium Ore Rubble to start with... i don't recall which i also tried, Ignium Ore (1x Crusher) or Ignium Powder (2x Crusher) but i did find that at least one did not work being fed directly into a Boiler... i don't think i tried the other one because i only tried real quickly while setting up output from the ore or powder which ever one was close when i was working on it... since i also found another Ignium Deposit fairly close by, i've tapped it as well and am no longer so concerned about running out of Ignium before i can get fully into Solar...

[Nova]

Does adding multiple Boilers/Steamers increase the MW usage. i built two steamers and its the same wattage as one. This also happened with the biomass burners.

[Mister Fabulous]

Yeah for now it's Ignium ore rubble, then portable fuel.

Crushed ignium has the same energy as rubble, so there's no benefit in doing that and you can't burn jetpack fuel in energy producers. Coke-d (that's censored??) ignium is a loss because the resulting materials equal the energy of the input, but you have to spend energy to make it so don't use that either.

The material cost alone for the olumite that you need to make fuel rods exceeds what you get out of it turning it into portable fuel instead by a good amount right now, and portable fuel doesn't need ignium where rods do. This isn't counting the energy needed to make either as well so rods are an even bigger loss in comparison. Hopefully that gets rebalanced.

There may be a point where the mining efficiency research makes rods worth while, but I'm not doing that math on that right now.


EDIT:

Originally posted by Nova:

Does adding multiple Boilers/Steamers increase the MW usage. i built two steamers and its the same wattage as one. This also happened with the biomass burners.

No, they will output as much as they need, but their fuel consumption will be reduced.

For example, if you needed 3.6MW total and only had one boiler/turbine, they would be running constantly. If you built a second set and your power consumption did not change, the fuel would take twice as long to burn in the boilers.

[wkitty42]

that's nice to know...

does anyone know if there is a limit to the number of Transformers that can be fed from one Boiler/Turbine combination?

[Mister Fabulous]

No, no limit. The numbers of the transformers are just the limit each one can transfer from high to low. You could build one large transformer on a set of blocks or 5 small ones right next to each other and be able to pull 25MW with either setup.

You can have 4 small isolated factories connected only by power lines, no floors touching, each with their own small transformer. So long as the power need of all of them put together doesn't exceed 3.6MW for that one turbine powering them, that's just fine to do.

[Fenix]

Originally posted by wkitty42:

that's nice to know...

does anyone know if there is a limit to the number of Transformers that can be fed from one Boiler/Turbine combination?

Technically you need 2 turbines, for a small transformer, at max output.
Turbine = 3.6 MW max output
Small Transformer = 5 MW max Output
Large Transformer = 25 MW max Output
So you need 7 turbines for one large transformer.

[Mister Fabulous]

Made a small example just to show 4 separate platforms being powered by one turbine and what the network diagram looks like.

The build: https://imgur.com/OpQebie
The network: https://imgur.com/s9Ro9AP

If the green bars are confusing, it's the capacity of each network. The turbine is almost maxed out. The bars on each transformer are so low because it's showing the power being drawn relative to how much they can draw which is why the bar for the large one providing power to one loader doesn't even show up.

Even though each can draw 5-25MW, if there's only 3.6 available in this case, they'll never go over that since it's just not there.

[wkitty42]

thank you Mister Fabulous and Fenix... that's good info... the question now is if i can remember it without getting overwhelmed