[A12d] RedistHeat - Vents/Ducts (Oct 12, v42b) Small heater fix

[Kaballah]

Latta I really like the changes you've made and how there are just two dedicated duct networks now, the cross piece approach in the older version was always a bit clunky.  Such a neat and interesting mod 

[erathia]

Adf.ly link does'nt work anymore, y'know
Still, nice work!

[Shabazza]

Are there some numbers available to compare those new items with the vanilla heater/cooler?
How is the heating/cooling power of each piece?

It's sad that even the vanilla game does not give numbers in the info menu other than the power demand.
People have to experiment and reverse-engineer it to get some usable numbers. 

[DJMurtz]

I'm having issues getting my cooling system to work as expected.

I am unsure why, but it seems that a room that is frozen to -20 C, with several intake vents, only gets the coupled pipes down to -8.

A couple of notes on the screenshot:

- I enabled/disabled the other four intake vents, made no difference
- I disconnected the cooling network to keep only a short length of pipes, that brought the temperature down to -8 (before it got stuck at ~0)
- The room with the industrial coolers is a constant -20


[attachment deleted due to age]

[Kaballah]

The duct network acts basically like a room, and temperature equalizes in and out of it through whatever duct endpoint equipment e.g. duct intakes, smartfans or whatever.  If you have more outlet capacity (smartfans, duct openings w/e) than you have intake, then you can have a situation like you see.  If you watch the movie Brazil you understand all of this.

[Shabazza]

After testing this out in detail, I have gathered some suggestions for balancing the machines to work well with the vanilla parts.
I tested each part in hot or cold environment with a 50 m² room and compared their effectivity and efficiency with those of the vanilla cooler/heater.
I didn't look at the energy output values in the .xmls. I did a practical test as there are too much influencial things in the game to get a realistic impression by just looking at the raw numbers.
If someone can not confirm my expierience, feel free to comment on this.

Here 2 pictures of my test setups in a very cold and a very hot world:
http://imgur.com/a/2lCmK

Industrial Cooler: This one is only about 40% stronger than a vanilla cooler while needing 5 times the power with 1 exh. port.
And with each added exhaust port, it's efficiency gets lower and lower.
This cooler should be 2x stronger than now with 1 exhaust port to reach the same region than vanilla coolers and adding exhaust ports should either need less extra power or they should have a stronger effect to reach a sweet spot where they outperform vanilla coolers.
And this should also consider the necessara space. It needs 25% more space in the base configuration (1 exh. port) than an equally strong "2 vanilla cooler"-setup
and still needs 25% more power then.
So this one is really underpowered right now. It should have a little higher efficiency than vanilla coolers eventually, to become interesting.
There's no reason to use it atm. Give it some love, please.

Duct Outlet: Way too slow in transporting air. A smart durct is faster several times and also, well...smart. So currently Duct Outlets are not worth it at all.
I think they should have the same transport rate than smart ducts.

Active Vent: Don't know. But this one showed no difference in equilization speed whatsoever compared to it's energy-less normal vent counterpart.
The difference should be much more noticable to be actually woth it.

Industrial Heater: I measured about 280% more strength than the vanilla heater.
In a real setup, 3-4 vanilla heaters have basicly the same heating capacity but for max. 400W instead of 500W.
So I'd reduce it's power demand to 350W or even 300W to get in the same efficiency area than the vanilla heater.
Currently, this heater is not interresting because it's one large block and still only 60% as efficient as vanilla heaters.

Hope this will help balancing this awesome mod further.

[Kaballah]

I have a weird problem where some (not all) of my smart duct outlets are deciding not to run, even though the room they service is too cold.  I can see that the smartfan is at "low power usage/2W" even though the room is colder than the thermostat setting (21C) but a room right next to it with the same hookup is working correctly and is kept warm.  What's going on there? 

e: Does this happen when there isn't enough heat in the duct network?  It's weird that some of them will run continuously but some will stay mostly off/always off.

[mav]

I have a weird problem where some (not all) of my smart duct outlets are deciding not to run, even though the room they service is too cold.  I can see that the smartfan is at "low power usage/2W" even though the room is colder than the thermostat setting (21C) but a room right next to it with the same hookup is working correctly and is kept warm.  What's going on there? 

e: Does this happen when there isn't enough heat in the duct network?  It's weird that some of them will run continuously but some will stay mostly off/always off.

Did you place something in front of the outtakes? I had the problem with some items in the enhanced storage mod that I thought won't influence the flow path.

[Kaballah]

No, nothing was constructed in front of smart duct outlets at all (or any other element of duct equipment)

[Kaballah]

You know what, after playing with the Duct Cooler for some time, I think it would make a lot of sense to have a heater counterpart.  It works really well and is not as complicated to set up.  Maybe add a new asset that does this, or convert one of the existing ones to work this way.

[Shabazza]

BUG:
Duct coolers do not react to switching their power off or switching their airflow off.
They run continuously.
Haven't tested other heaters/coolers yet.

[Megafly]

I really like this mod for the possibility of creating a central cooling system, however, I can't use it for a central heat unless I set up a "hot room" as a source of hot air.

Suggestion: make a duct heater, the counterpart of the duct cooler, for those pesky death-cold maps.

Mega

[Kaballah]

Yeah the duct cooler really spoiled me, it just makes a lot of sense and is very straightforward to set up 

[LLoki]

Yeah, duct heater would be great. Right now heating system with duct pipes is not effective at all. It's cheaper to place one industrial cooler in hall + wents or place one small heater in each room.

But for those all who have their bases in mountain core with ESM-MountainTemp mod and have problems with rooms heatig - use the older version of this mod. Recently I started a new colony in cold climate and I was supprised why I have a problem to heat some even a small rooms (I needed two small heaters for 5x5 room to achieve about 21C degrees) while some other rooms stayed with 21C or more by using one heater with no problem. It appears that new version of ESM-MountainTemp mod had change stable mountain temperature from 15C to 0C (honestly dunno why), so all mountain rooms tried to equalize to 0C, fighting with my heaters . I tried to switch off this mod, but it crached my saves. So I downloaded an older version and replaced the files. It works now - stable temp is around 15C and it's really easier to heat the room. But no with the ductworks really, I tried different solutions with industrial heaters like you all, but it's not effective at the moment.

[MisterVertigo]

I'll throw my name in the hat here for a duct heater. I'll admit that I tried this mod but could never figure out how to get the heating all set up properly so I stopped using it. A duct heater seems like it would make a LOT more sense and would be easier to set up.

Just my two cents...