Active cooling without steel.

This can be built as soon as you have plastic and oil. It's the first real cooling I use other than wheezeworts (usually). It's nothing new or mind-bending, but it's a useful reference for my upcoming videos and a good way to do early-ish cooling that new players may like.

[@sesseyei]

Appreciate that you went through how to practically construct this. It's a lot more helpful than the pure sandbox demonstrations.

[@anonymxxx2900]

I actually like your tutorials because it's simple explanation but easy to understand not like other channel that long explanation. it's just you can use sandbox mode to build instantly instead waiting duplicants to build.

[@tonyadvanced6315]

I have so much trouble deciding whether to use sandbox or not... Some viewers seem to really benefit from seeing it constructed.

[@newCoCoY6]

is there a way though to deconstruct stuff in sandbox mode without using the destroy tool?

[@tonyadvanced6315]

@@newCoCoY6 There is and I somehow didn't know about it until recently. I suspect you need to be in debug mode for it. Just press ctrl-F4 and all the normal actions happen instantly. (I.e. Deconstruct)

[@daulken]

@@tonyadvanced6315 I don't mind when people use sandbox to speed things up if you can follow along and see that it's possible. You saying "ok here's a pipe that I can't build without a bunch of scaffolding, boom, it's here because of sandbox" is way different from "Ok, now I need this room that's a vacuum, exactly 200kg of oil, 16 pokeshells, 2 roe eggs, and a sleeping duplicant, boom, made it in sandbox. Those videos became worth less for most players who haven't made this game their entire life. :p

[@greedtheron8362]

After getting a vacuum and all my stuff in there, I always seal up the steam room, then get liquid in there by making a small pump pit to attach to the output of the steam turbine. You get a lot more control over how much of what gets in there than just dupes bringing in bottles lying around.

[@Nathans-Sandbox]

Nice and easy design. Thanks for the video!

[@JimmyWirsborg]

The actual construction-part is what I'm missing in almost all the other videos I watch... sure the blue print looks cool but actually building it step by step in an efficient way is the hard part imho...

[@larrylindgren9484]

People love to say, "here you are it's simple." Skipping everything they did to build it. If you're making a guild it show be a step by step of how you do something. Not a 15 minute talk on things that don't matter then say, There you go!"

[@МаксимМинин-у7ц]

6:54 You'd want to cool down your base and not a random room full of warm water * coughs * Of course, of course, why would i do that

[@PyrokineticFire1]

you'd do that if using something rare like supercoolant in the aquatuner. you can cool a random room of water, then use that room to cool a loop of mundane coolant that flows around the base.

[@tuaans9934]

Nice bro. Keep it up.

[@kingjames4886]

it can get stuck in a loop like that if you have the wrong number of pipe sections in the bypass section and you over-fill the bridges and the aqua tuner... it can also get so the coolant pauses for a second every time it moves when the aqua tuner turns off. another thing that could be useful in this sort of setup is to add a thermo sensor on an and gate with the pipe liquid sensor to keep the steam chamber below the breaking point of the aqua tuner or it can get carried away if your steam turbine fails for whatever reason.

[@Beregorn88]

There is a much easier way to vacuum your room. Just dump oil, water and polluted water in your room: no matter how much, it will form 3 layers, each 1 tile high. Once you seal the room, it will have only liquids inside.

[@tonyadvanced6315]

Yes. I wish I had shown that method in my "how to make a vacuum" demo as well.

[@TheMule71]

P water is no good for that. Salt water or brine are superior. If you dump oil, water and p-water, you have to make sure you put enough water in, and use a lot of heat. What I mean, when the temp reaches 100C and the water starts flashing into steam, there is a chance that the pwater offgasses p oxygen before the steam pressure stabilizes. This becomes less and less likely the more water you put it, and the stronger the heat source is. What you don't want is small quantities of water to flash, or the process being slow. In this setup, if the aquatuner stops at the wrong moment when the temp is around 100C, the steam may start condensing back into water, reducing the pressure and letting p-water offgas. This is less likely to happen in other setups (think volcano tamers for power) where the initial heat is strong enough to flash large quantities of water into steam and instantly create a nice steam pressure. You aim straight at 200C and stop draining heat when you get there. The second reason p-water is bad, is that it leaves behind dirt instead of salt. If for any reason dirt heats up to 329C, it turns into a solid tile of sand, entombing your aquatuner. Ok, in this particular case, 329C would destroy your gold amalgam AT way before that happens. But steel ATs might be able to survive such a spike w/o taking huge damage (they start overheating at 325C), and some people do like to operate their ST+AT setups above 200C by closing the intakes with doors, so it's not that unlikely. Salt melts at 800+C, so it's not a concern (and anyway, oil or petroleum are already sour gas at that temperature, so your chamber is already a mess at that point). The technique you describe is solid, I use it all the time, just I prefer not to use p-water as the third liquid if some other type of water is available.

[@stevanlargacha5885]

0:57 if u look closely u can notice an insulated tile inside of the water chamber instrad of a radiant one, and that is giving me anxiety

[@psteels]

Build the complete setup without vacuum, start the system until you have steam (you ll have mixed gasses + steam) stop the system, open a tile on top of the AT chamber and it will spew steam and the other gasses immediately. Close the tile, wait for the water to condense and vacuum is done! Much faster, you just have to mop after.

[@TheMule71]

It works only if the gasses inside are lighter than steam. Won't work with CO2 or chlorine. It's good for H2, O2, pO2, natural gas and others, tho.

[@5ins519]

Sorry guys I’m newbie to this game u mean output pipe can cool down the base right but what should i do ? sorry for my English

[@tonyadvanced6315]

That pipe will be cold. So just build the pipe through any part of your base that you want to keep cold. If you use granite to build the pipe it transmits heat better than the other materials.

[@5ins519]

Thank you save my day Keep doing content likes this even other game i bet one day your channel can reach more than 100k sub ;)

[@moldycarrot9267]

Could granite tempshift plates work better? In terms of system stability, the conductivity isn't as good but it's still not bad.

[@tonyadvanced6315]

I haven't tried them out but my best guess is that they would work just fine.

[@PyrokineticFire1]

it doesn't need awesome conductivity. it's just adding mass & spreading heat more evenly because of how temp shifts interact.

[@squid_cake]

Granite has only a little less thermal conductivity than copper ore (it's only about 3.4 TC compared to copper ore's 4.5). The gold amalgam aquatuner in the video only reaches around 125°C max with an overheat temperature of 175. There looks to be a lot of wiggle room with what material is used for tempshifts. So granite would most definitely be able to work as a tempshift plate instead

[@tehmessiah5617]

Can you do one of these for Thermo Regulators instead of aqua tuners?

[@hyperforce]

If you have oil available why not use oil as your coolant ? Though I suppose it could be just some oil from slicksters and not the oil biome.

[@tonyadvanced6315]

Oil has a specific heat of 1.69 and water has a specific heat of 4.179. That means that cooling with oil only does 40% of the work of water but costs the same. (The cost is the power to run the aquatuner). The benefit of using oil is that it can get to lower temperatures, but if you don't need lower temperatures then it's cheaper to use water.

[@sandcastle1310]

hey umm got any sugestion what kind of material that i can use to replace gold amalgam ? because i play at Arboria map so i have no gold amalgam

[@ExplosivePine]

Well nothing else gives +50 overheat so Ig no. You could use steel if you want but then what is the point of this

[@gamingstraub3870]

Can you have more than one aqua tuner

[@tonyadvanced6315]

I haven't done the numbers, but I'm pretty certain you'll need one steam turbine for each AT. One steam turbine isn't powerful enough to keep two ATs cool if you are running water through them continuously. Also, in this situation the temperature has to be kept low enough to prevent the ATs from overheating, so you can't even run the steam turbine at it's maximum potential.

[@longpham-sj5sv]

Build 2 aquatuners to maximize steam turbine massive cooling power :p

[@tonyadvanced6315]

I think that would work. Thank you.

[@larrylindgren9484]

If you can make the plastic for the Turbine. You probably have steel anyway.

[@nimb321]

AAAAAAAAAH! I got a Copper-Volcano next to my new Colony! I need the early-game-steel-free-double-caffeinated-Volcano-tamer NAUWGH!!! :D

[@KerbalSpacey]

pretty sure ur gonna need some steel for that one :P easiest way is to just build 1 metal refinery somewhere close to base and just pump it full of liquid u never want (i use nearby slime biome water), when the pipe breaks through overheating just disable repairs on the pipe and it can run forever, basically u never get the liquid u pump in back out unless u break or fix that pipe that broke but can pump in as much as the refinery needs forever... heads up if u do deconstruct the pipe sometime just remember its gonna be very hot steam lol

[@nimb321]

@@KerbalSpacey But the advertisement said, the volcano tamer would be steel-free :P

[@MascotCoding]

I love this no steel approach! Helps a lot for newbies like me!

[@Shammikaze]

I like it. I only just started making cooling loops, and the guide said to use steel, so I'd been wondering how to avoid that need. Thanks!

[@chelch]

Best ONI tutorial! I can actually follow and understand what you're doing. Well done!

[@Tehhify]

Nice build :) Although technically it does use steel - you've built a filter gate out of steel at 7:51 :D No need for that obviously :)

[@tonyadvanced6315]

Wow. Good eye, I'm impressed. I fixed that but I edited it out in the final video.

[@Diospepreco]

Finally a good and updated explanation of this cooling system. Usually it's just people drawing over-complicated stuff in sandbox mode with perfect materials and no real explanation. I have only a couple questions. 1- The initial water you put inside the aquatuner room, which evaporates into steam and starts the whole process. Will it run forever? Does it just stay in steam form in this eternal cycle of cooling/heating without any loss? 2- Tempshift plates. Never used them so far and I'd like to be 100% positive about their functioning. Basically they distribute the heat between the oil and the steam, which is sucked in by the turbine, cooled down and outputted in the aquatuner room again. Is this correct?

[@arturmonteirodacosta170]

1 - The steam is used by the steam turbine and gets converted back to water at 95ºC, which in turn gets heated up back to 100ºC by the aquatuner, so yes, it's perpetual, you are destroying just the heat, not the elements. 2 - Correct.

[@Diospepreco]

Thanks. Will try my first cooling system in the near future.

[@manaherb6]

Very helpful video. Thanks!

[@bradrad1494]

I know this is old but does this still work? And good job!

[@0x0404]

The oil is important. It makes it work very well.

[@Shammikaze]

I also like your use of looping/automating directly at the aquatuner (disable tuner, liquid flows past) instead of in a "coolant tank" (use liquid shutoff to redirect to a different set of pipes). This seems to have removed a lot of unnecessary spaghetti.

[@lucasriley874]

I'll usually have the sensor/bypass at the aquatuner too but I'll still often pop a liquid tank on the line somewhere. I like to have a buffer of extra liquid in case I want to quickly extend the cooling loop or draw off some cold liquid for something else. Not needed but I find it very useful.

[@TheMule71]

@@lucasriley874 It's extremely useful to even out the temperature of the packets. Sometimes some odd cases happen, since the packet at the sensors isn't the packet that enters the tuner. In this case, it's very close, but so it's much less likely to create huge differences, but I've seen cases where the same packet gets cooled down (despite being cold already) while a warmer packet skips the tuner. Tanks always average out the temp of the fluid inside. And you don't need a full tank, I'd say you need to store about twice the amount of fluid you circulate in the loop (so for a loop that holds 50 10kg packets of liquid, that would be 1000 Kg in the reservoir, about 1/5 full). For larger loops, you can go with a 1:1 ratio maybe. Also I some cases I route the output of the tuner directly back to the tank, and not to the loop. That allows very precise tuning of the minimum temp of fluid inside the loop which is good if you want to push the coolant to the lower limit, or if you need to keep something within a precise range.

[@nunoosorio3832]

So small it's genius.

[@Hidinginyourcupboard]

Really helpful, ta

[@FisherManPride]

Normally we build this near to our geyser but the temperate around that area is usually >45, is it still ok for us to build this setup there? Or should i cool that area down first?

[@tonyadvanced6315]

I've never tried this in a place that started out at more than 145C. I don't think the aquatuner would have any problem because that room gets vacuumed out anyway. But the steam turbine won't work if it's over 100C, I'm guessing that would be the tricky part.

[@FisherManPride]

What about the temperature for crude oil?? I notice yours is only at 10C, how??

[@tonyadvanced6315]

@@FisherManPride In my game I sandboxed it in. 10C must have been the default temperature. I bet the crude oil is fine up to 145C, but I haven't done this experiment, so it's hard to be sure.

[@FisherManPride]

@@tonyadvanced6315 alright thanks ! :)

[@kampfer91]

Uhm , so how do you cool down the steam turbine itself ?

[@tonyadvanced6315]

The coolant pipe goes through the room with the turbine.

[@chemie7037]

Reason for a not gate? The sensor has above and below which gives same function. I like the vacuum method; I usually did pumps which is a pain and slow

[@tonyadvanced6315]

It's a filter gate. The reason is to prevent the aquatuner from turning on and off quickly.

[@chemie7037]

@@tonyadvanced6315 but then you will have a packet get in the tuner that is below the cut off temp resulting is frozen packet....You actually want it to turn off every time the logic is triggered because it means a packets should not pass through

[@Ozmundas]

I THINK (noob here) based on my limited experience ... if this setup didn't have the buffer gate , when the signal went red there is enough pipe there that if there was only 1 packet of cold water it would end up sending it into the tuner, as the next packet would be hot which would turn the aqua-tuner back on, and the cold packet would get sucked into it.

[@tonyadvanced6315]

@@chemie7037 Since it's a filter gate, it turns off the aquatuner immediately. It just has to wait at least 5 seconds to turn back on again. If you do this in a loop that doesn't bypass the AT then you need two thermo sensors to be sure a cold packet doesn't sneak into the AT and get frozen.

[@tonyadvanced6315]

@@Ozmundas That's a very good insight. Technically, I think that vulnerability exists in this setup, but since the coolant loops continuously all the packets tend to be very close in temperature and I don't think it's possible for a too-cold packet to get frozen. In cases where that's a problem it can be worked around by using two pipe-thermo-sensors instead of one.

[@feflechi]

Simple setup and well explained thanks. How many cycles before the steam turbine overheats ? In my experience it requires some cooling, is that radiant segment behind what it is for ?

[@tonyadvanced6315]

You got it, the aquatuner cools the turbine via the radiant segment. I meant to make it three radiant segments but I think one is enough.

[@saltiej]

The Aquatuner will get stuck if the bridge output is in front of the aquatuner output. so at 4 minutes if you ran the bridge up and then piped thru the tuner output to the bottom pipe it would work for awhile, even turn on and off right. but if it fills the bridge it will break and then endlessly loop. The aqua tuner never has an empty output, so it will stop. I noobed this for awhile. I understood inlet priorities, for some reason it didn't translate to the output side in my head also. I fought a sour gas boiler for awhile....

[@Ozmundas]

I just add a liquid reservoir to the loop to avoid the "pipe full" situation myself. I have no luck when it comes to inlet priorities ... every time I think I have it , it doesn't work right. :)

[@karimjundi2941]

This is great video, but I didn't understand what was the whole thing about the water pipe and aquatuner getting stuck and the bridge and all that. Can someone please explain that to me?

[@daulken]

Hey Karim, If you make a circle of pipe (gas or liquid), and attach a pump to fill it up, it will stop moving once it's full. If you have a machine in there with an input and an output, while the machine is running, it will continue to loop in a circle (important for lots of reasons). However, if the machine turns off the contents stop moving. If you put a bridge in an otherwise completely empty loop (imagine if the aquatuner wasn't there) it will continue to loop. That design lets the liquid coolant continue to move regardless of whether the aquatuner is on or not (otherwise it would get stagnant and stop cooling until the machine turned back on).

[@draggy76]

Wouldn't you need to do a smidge bitt extra with the pipes to say, make it pass past the steam turbine to keep it from overheating as well?

[@PyrokineticFire1]

there's ONE section of pipe that's radiant (rather than insulated) behind the steam turbine. Tony claims that's enough. I usually do a little more myself & it's overkill

[@AjaxAssault]

That liquid bridge bypass for the aquatuner intake didn't get stuck for me, but instead was bypassing the aquatuner with every packet of water, not just when backed up. Built it identically, but mirrored left/right. Re-did the bypass with an extra bridge. Was exactly the cooling bump I needed since finding an iron volcano, thank you for the steel-free setup info!

[@tonyadvanced6315]

Sweet! :) I'm interested in seeing what you did with the bridges if you happen to want to post a screenshot or something.

[@AjaxAssault]

It also overheated the turbine within a few cycles. I ran the aquatuner output through radiant pipes over the turbine to cool it down. We'll see if she holds stable now :)

[@balintnemes7149]

so basically just forget about heat before reaching an oil biome?

[@tonyadvanced6315]

You can use wheezeworts or move heat around in various ways or vent something hot to space, but getting plastic in one way or another seems to be the major requirement for dealing with heat in a way that is permanent, scales to quantity, and efficient for dupe-time and resources.

[@deviousbutton9211]

10/10 Nice and simple, good stuff everyone needs to know.

[@tachau88]

I missed you

[@tonyadvanced6315]

Aw, thanks! I have some good stuff coming. I've been very busy.

[@KerbalSpacey]

@@tonyadvanced6315 Tony you are a beast for simplicity and efficiency, i think some tutorial/build for metal refinery, oil refinery, glass refinery etc would be very nice for the noobies like myself. I think the metal refinery and oil are best for a quick video/guide, especially metal refinery for steel. I've seen people re-use the same coolant with loops to power steam turbines and implemented those etc but I know you would make a nice sexy guide/build for that for us

[@80sOutrunFan]

Thanks, this video really helped setting up my first aquatuner, just one question : what timeout/delay do i set on the Filtergate?

[@tonyadvanced6315]

I usually leave it set to 5 seconds.

[@80sOutrunFan]

@@tonyadvanced6315 Thanks, yeah it seems to be working, 12C water to my aquatuner/steamturbine/base cooling :).

[@80sOutrunFan]

@@tonyadvanced6315 Not sure if stuff changed related to this since 2019 but after running for several cycles it does slowly overheat. Tried more oil, more water (so more steam) etc. No luck. Changed to Steel and no more problems. I do want it to work with gold. To be continued :)

[@Arkaon666]

thanks as always but i always get steel faster than oil, dont know if im doing something wrong XD, as for the plastic, i rush drekos

[@tonyadvanced6315]

For me it's about the same. Fossil is in the oil biomes after all.

[@Arkaon666]

@@tonyadvanced6315 eggs, lots of eggs for my aquatuners XD, waiting for the tapping of the volcano, im playing a modified terra map and have 7 metallic volcanoes XD

[@KerbalSpacey]

@@Arkaon666 I also usually get dreko farms going early for plastic lol they do more than enough and provide some free food and lime from eggs etc as for oil i'm same but just get into the habit of digging straight down to oil fairly early too and there u got everything u need.

[@Denso481]

I tried this, but for some reason my Aqua Tuner keeps overheating above 175c. I got lots of oil, temp shift plates and it's made from gold amalgam. any ideas why this happens?

[@tonyadvanced6315]

Put a screenshot on imgur.com or wherever and post a link here and I'll take a look.

[@Denso481]

@@tonyadvanced6315 imgur.com/a/bGE73qF There you go, and thanks for the help!

[@Denso481]

I think I found the issue, there's a problem with your design: enclosing the steam turbine causes it to overheat after a some time, causing it to temporarily shut off (when it goes above 100c). This in turn causes the heat in the chamber below it to accumulate faster which causes the aquatuner to overheat. removing the insulation around the steam turbine fixes this

[@tonyadvanced6315]

@@Denso481I'm glad you got it figured out. I can't see your plumbing but consider routing the cooling pipe through the steam turbine room to keep it cool like in the video. It will generate a lot of heat and it makes it easier to control if it's enclosed.

[@Denso481]

@@tonyadvanced6315 That's exactly what I did eventually. Didn't initially route the pipes through the turbine room and didn't realize you had to do it, makes a big difference. My mistake here, sorry. And thanks again for getting back to me, cheers!

[@wrinklymon]

New to the game, if you had the steel what would you do different and why?

[@zaogames4875]

Make the aquatuner out of steel and don't add the layer of crude oil. Steel has a higher overheat temperature than gold and a steel aquatuner can transfer its temp to the surrounding steam quick enough without the need for crude oil.

[@isawadelapradera6490]

​@@zaogames4875 DON'T SKIP THE OIL - it doesn't only serve a conductive purpose, it also prevents a heat deleting bug that'll cause your turbine to waste a lot of heat - making your cooling way more expensive. Explanation: kzbin.info/www/bejne/b2Gad5qrmcR0jpo

[@zaogames4875]

@@isawadelapradera6490 True, my bad. Keep in mind that you have to put the liquid vent in the layer of oil if you want to dodge the bug

[@mgnapping]

so does tempshift plate try to equalize temperature of everything in the room? I never quite understood those.

[@Cloud_Seeker]

The tempshift plate will spread around heat to everything around itself. So one tile will spread its heat to the 8 other nearby tiles. So if you have a pass or liquid within those tiles. The Tempshift plate will help push heat from the gas, liquid of solid into each other. Thereby equalize the temperature. It is rather anoying to have a very hot liquid and a not so hot gas when you want a hot gas. This is also why you should NEVER put a tempshift plate next to a insolated tile. The point of the insolated tile is that it will not absorb or release heat fast. The tempshift plate will cause the insolated tile to ignore that, and instead the tempshift plate will force heat in or out of the block.

[@zam9791]

So this is the infamous bypass loop that ruin many

[@Alfredox314]

Sadly my aquatunner still overheats even with the tempshifts and crude oil, on the other hand it seems to be outdated as of the current patch, you need weezeworts to cool the turbine down, beats the point of the entire setup.

[@PyrokineticFire1]

consider the amount of water/steam in the room. 900 kg/tile absorbs a lot of heat with less temperature change than a 10 kg/tile steam room. another option is adding another steam turbine to keep eating hot steam and returning warm water. surely 2 turbines can defeat 1 aquatuner cycling a normal-coolant. also automation could include an And Gate requiring that the steam isn't too hot to prevent the aquatuner (the only heat source in the room) from cooking itself. maybe that means the system can't cool as much as desired, but that's the limitations of lower tech/materials.

[@newCoCoY6]

Bad self experience, i filled the aquatuner area full of water, and now i have 1000 kg steam per tile that is so hard to get to 125deg that the insulated tiles and the turbine just end up eating the heat and escaping the room and ends up not becoming energy.

[@tonyadvanced6315]

Also, if you did it the way I do then your liquid vent will overpressure.

[@isawadelapradera6490]

if your heat is getting away at such rate, you probably want better insulation.