Best heating/cooling method?

[Innese]

Just wanted to get a little conversation going about what people may consider the best way for heating/cooling a base during the various stages of construction.

I've only played A8 for a little bit, only enough to get a little communal bunker dug into the side of a mountain, but I've found I can heat/cool the entire base (so far) year round (I forget which of the 2 new 'cold' biomes the colony is in) by first creating a freezer with the wall-units heating end pointing back into the base, and then its cooling end into the freezer, of course.

This worked for a little bit... Till I realized that the base (The part being heated anyway) was pushing well over 90F! Rather than try toying with moving the freezer's wall unit, all I did was mount a second wall unit with its cooling side in the main portion of the base, and its heating side pointing to the outdoors.

Now, my base hovers at 70F (+/- 1 or 2 degrees) practically year round.

Doubt this would work for larger bases, or any sort of base with a bunch of separate buildings/rooms, but I was wondering what everyone else might come up with!

[xort]

If you make a geothermal plant indoors with a 1 square walk away all around it will push the temp above 100C, I'm not sure if you can weaponize heaters.

I'm wanted to play on a cool area, so I found the lowest temp possible thinking it might keep the natives or pirates at bay when it's -40 out. They all come with parkas.

I have a freezer area that I had to use a cooling unit during the summer, but found it was working overtime to try and heat it in winter, so i put a heater in my freezer set for -1C. I'm unsure if the cooler was doing anything to cool my base while trying to raise the temp in the freezer.

I'd suggest throwing a heater in each room, or giving your guys a parka if they are cold. 

[Snowpig]

i tried tundra yesterday as well.

My setup was: one room set up as cold storage and an adjacent room set up as kitchen. Putting your cooler with the "cold" side in the storage and the "hot" side in the kitchen gives you some cheap (albeit not very effective) heating in the kitchen area.

Concerning geothermal plant: the larger the room, the less the temperature build-up. I'd suggest making a super-large room with the geothermal inside and use the heat for hydroponics/common rooms.

[Riftmaster]

I'm kinda wondering how best to cool (heating is less problematic) individual rooms assigned to colony members.
So far as I can tell, each room has it's own temperature, related in some way to the outside.

I had hoped that tunneling into the mountain would basically give me cave temperatures, but that does not appear to have worked...


At the moment I'm planning to put a cooling unit in the corridor wall of each individual room (I build them in rows), then add another cooling unit to the hallway that exhausts into the main base/outside.  However, obviously whatever heat those units pull out of the rooms will have to be cooled/transferred with the other unit(s), so I'm looking at a somewhat significant increase in power use here, to keep my colonists rooms comfortable (so they don't go crazy and kill each other and/or die).

[milon]

I haven't extensively tested this, but here's my current understanding of the mechanics.  Having even 1 tile without a roof makes the area Outdoors.  Heaters just produce heat (duh).  Walls do not "leak" heat/cold (I think).  Coolers vent heat out the back, but do not leak any of that heat into the same room (I think).  Doors do leak heat/cold, and having multiple doors in series decreases the amount of leak that occurs.  The leak is much faster when the door is open.  I had a colonist stand in the doorway of my freezer to mine a nearby tile of ore.  The freezer immediately started to warm up while the base began cooling.  Once the ore was mined and the colonist moved on, the base warmed up again and the freezer cooled back down.

[dd0029]

I was messing around with my first A8 colony in the temperate biome. During the summer, I was able to maintain ~20c with a single cooler vented outside in my fairly standard base setup. The winter however, was an entirely different matter.

Does anyone know how many squares a heater will effectively heat?

[Mechanoid Hivemind]

I was messing around with my first A8 colony in the temperate biome. During the summer, I was able to maintain ~20c with a single cooler vented outside in my fairly standard base setup. The winter however, was an entirely different matter.

Does anyone know how many squares a heater will effectively heat?

As far as i can tell its a 6x6 with no up and down of temp. idk if its right but thats what i was getting, anything outside of the 6x6 it fluxes i might be wrong but idk yet ill do more testing

[Dr. Z]

I think there are no distance restrictions atm, it just cools down the room it's pointing in.

[_alphaBeta_]

The red and blue overlays for the new temperature devices should show you what they're affecting. The larger the room, the less effect each unit will have. Outside ambient plays a role as well. It's assuming equalization with the outside ambient occurs through the floor and roofs. This applies to caves as well.

You can estimate how much a heater can do on average, but experimentation is needed based on the map you're playing, what the outside ambient is, and what temperature you're trying to achieve.

As was said, doors always leak, especially when they're opened (makes sense). Climate controlled airlocks can help.

[Dave-In-Texas]

I am still in my first game year, just reached September.  I chose a place with year round growing as my first colony.

I did some related testing:
I've had two (so far) unusual heat waves, outside temps exceeded 130F

Room Types:
Small rooms (7 x 5) with AC
small rooms without AC encapsulated in a larger room (irregular but basically 20x20) with a single AC unit
small room for a freezer 

AC:
all non-freezer ac units are set to 88.  on the high end but not the highest tolerance.
freezer units are set to 28F

The stand alone rooms did great except that there were 4 of them for 800W of electric, stayed within 4 degrees of the setting.

the Freezer kept bouncing between 32F and 41F possibly due to the chef bouncing in and out.

by the way, the encapsulated rooms seem to stay 2-4F higher than the surrounding room, generally.

The encapsulating room got up to 114 and the smaller rooms a bit higher all for a cost of 200W.

I've added a second AC unit to the larger room to test how much effect that has.

[Riftmaster]

Well that's mildly amusing.

I was placing a cooling unit to face the outside, but one square of rock remained that kept a 2-square area it vented into as indoors.

Temp in that small area hit over 300 F in seconds.

If only I could manually open doors for attackers, I could cook em to death....