Turns out you can heat your base with coolers.

Mikhail Reign · December 15, 2014, 09:45:48 AM

I was experimenting with the cold worlds. Found one with a -30 to -100 average. I also wanted to test out a 'heating vent' idea - basically a heated shaft that runs behind all rooms, with coolers blowing heat into the base - a key point was to have only one room with heaters, and use coolers to move the heat around - preferably from the outer room to the inner rooms and the any excess out the front door

It seemed to work at first. I had 15-20 heaters in a shaft room so as to keep it at a steady 21 all the time. With some experimentation I found out that one cooler will blow hot air into a room faster then one can suck it out. So my design ended up being: a bedroom had a cooler sucking hot air from the heating shaft, one returned excess to the shaft and one pushing it into the hallway, to be pushed into the main room (also returned to the shaft) and then pushed out the front door.

I figured it would basically equalize over time. What ended up happening after some tweaking was the rooms all bounced between 21 and 25 (what I wanted) and the shaft ended up super heated (from the excess being returned to it). I then thought "Hey what would happen if I turned the heaters off?". My base has now been running a week without any heat source in -100 weather. The shaft remains heated to 50-70 with phantom heat made from moving air around.

Ps: it is an entirely solar/wind base - no geo heat.

Listy · December 15, 2014, 11:30:49 AM

You've just achieved the Equivalent of a perpetual motion machine with heat.. Well done!

skullywag · December 15, 2014, 12:12:31 PM

Lol you might wanna upload your save and world file for Tynan im sure hed love to nerf that one...sounds genious though.

Chibiabos · December 15, 2014, 12:49:05 PM

Even if he fixes /that/, you could always build a room around your Geothermal Generator which will superheat, use coolers from that to heat adjacent rooms, and coolers in those to rooms farther out, and so on. Just the ambient heat from a Geothermal is probably enough to heat a whole base ... though I'm using one to heat a large greenhouse.

Drone · December 15, 2014, 01:41:07 PM

You uh, realise that no cooling system is 100% efficient? All that's happening is the "waste" heat produced by the inefficiencies in the system are heating up the room more than they cool the other room.

Tynan · December 15, 2014, 01:55:08 PM

You're just heating with the waste heat from the coolers, which makes perfect sense.

I'm not certain it's balanced but at least it's not a perpetual motion machine.

Arigas · December 15, 2014, 02:44:54 PM

I use several geothermals to heat my one base. Main corridor goes everywhere, has no doors, and is connected to 4 of them, and after adding in one or two AC units, I'm able to keep the temperature down nicely. Only need heaters in a few rooms since I got parkas for my entire colony now lol.

Mikhail Reign · December 15, 2014, 08:04:58 PM

Oh I was well aware what was happening. I just figured I probably wasn't meant to be generating over 150 degrees simply moving air around - the corridor had gotten to 96 while outside was under -100, while the last room in the chain before the front door (before I made way to return that air to the shalt) could also get to near 100 degrees.

Part of the reason that I bring this up is I would actually like to expand on it. I would like a temp object similar to the cooler, that let's me set the target temp of the room that being exhausted into (as opposed to the one that being drawn from). This would allow me to make a heating shaft and remove some of the redundent return coolers.

Until then, can I ask what the effeicency rating for the coolers are? It seems like it expells about 150% of the heat that's removed - ie: it takes 2 coolers to cool a room that's warmed by the exhaust of one cooler. Also does the temp of the exhaust room have any impact of the cooling ability of a cooler?

killer010 · December 16, 2014, 04:16:59 AM

I just think the cooler is very science for it's one side cool and one side hot
I don't think it's too unbalance, the heater is more efficient than the cooler in heating.
Just quite satisfy with the temperature system.

Mikhail Reign · December 16, 2014, 09:44:04 AM

Quote from: killer010 on December 16, 2014, 04:16:59 AM
I just think the cooler is very science for it's one side cool and one side hot
I don't think it's too unbalance, the heater is more efficient than the cooler in heating.
Just quite satisfy with the temperature system.

huh?

waldo2000 · December 16, 2014, 09:50:42 AM

@Mikhail Reign So you want a fan?

wooaa · December 17, 2014, 10:28:28 PM

I know it is just waste heat but when you posted this I thought of this clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vxHkAQRQUQ

Mikhail Reign · December 18, 2014, 01:06:43 AM

Heh, nice.

Yeah a fan sort of what I want. I think an easy way to do it would be change the coolers so they are just called 'ducted dan' or something, and allow me to pick which sides temp governs it - so I could say 'cool this room to 21' or 'warm this room to 21' - obviously you couldn't choose both sides at once.