Walls and insulation

[Ghizmo]

So I am trying to make my ice-sheet colony work.
However come winter time the temperatures drop to -60 or worse (outdoors) and even though I have two heaters the indoor areas still drop to -20 or something. Making it near impossible for me to survive, because I lose my food and wood supply since my growing areas can't reach the needed temperature.
I have steel walls, so I am kind of thinking that these walls don't insulate well enough and I lose a lot of heat because of them.
But I am wondering if this is actually true? Because I don't see anything in the info screen.

Would building wood walls be better? Or stone walls even? Because getting stone is much easier then wood currently is for me.

[Vaporisor]

There is insulation of sorts.  I am on a mobile so am sorry for typos or if something is written strange.

From what I experienced, the material doesnt matter, but thicker walls transfer less heat.  So double walls leak less.  A late game strategy I have tested is single wall rooms with a double thick outer hallways making the insulation.  This creates like a non freezing hall system usually about zero C and low heater requirements for room.

The following pics were from some testing and work quite well if you are patient with growth but double wall room is minimum to efficient keeping warm.

EDIT:  pics are not on my imgur.  Hrm... Will add when I am home on my comp.

[b0rsuk]

Extra thick walls don't seem to do much, but an airlock works wonders. Put a room inside a room. Heat the inner room.

[chchgreen]

i couldnt figure out why my complex wouldnt heat up??? installed 36 heaters, no luck, then i saw one of my pawns left some timber in the outer doorway!!! duh lol

[christhekiller]

I second the airlock idea. Instead of a pawn opening the door and letting all the warm air out they open a door and let all the warm air into a slightly colder room.

Also if your room is too big it might require more heaters. One small heater isn't going to completely warm up a giant ass room.

[Ghizmo]

To me a room the airlock sounds exactly the same as a room with double walls.
Both create double walls.

Aside from that I was already aware that a larger size room requires more effort to heat it up, but I got three mechanoid reactors heating up my production room, from which the vents lead all the heat to the smaller rooms and hallways. And then some heaters in far off places.

Anyways, I guess i'll be testing this idea then. But I'll make it a double wall, with an airlock system for the doors.
Thanks guys.

[Reiyuki]

The only way I was able to survive in -60 was by building around Geysers.  There just doesn't seem to be enough power or wood available to keep even a small room heated enough to survive indefinitely.

Wall-off a fairly large area around a geyser as fast as possible.  In the unlikely event that it gets too hot, you can prop the front door open for a minute.

As you build, try to work outward in layers.  A 'internals/criticals' layer with essential and often-used, followed by non-common or non-essential rooms, followed by a 1-2 wall thick 'air gap' insulation, followed by the outdoors.  That way your core is always well-heated.

Try to build inside mountains, as it seems to have higher insulation than building out in the open.

For the external wall, I've found that two walls with 1-2 block gap between them works much better than a 2-thick wall with no gap.

[Vaporisor]

i couldnt figure out why my complex wouldnt heat up??? installed 36 heaters, no luck, then i saw one of my pawns left some timber in the outer doorway!!! duh lol

That isn't supposed to vent when something is jamming a door open unless it was set to hold open in past or other error.

I attacked pictures of my test rooms.  The double inside, single outside is far less efficient than the single inside, double outside.  It takes a little to warm up, but once the outer hallway gets a little bit of heat, the room is perfectly comfortable as seen here.  It doubles in that if you have a cell of rooms like this with just the external double wall with airlock, it keeps the hallways a comfortable temperature.

There was a surprising difference between the two different layouts in the first picture.  The room on the right side bled heat faster and hallway was cooler.  The left image, and the four room sample one is the most energy and material efficient design in the testing.

I tested these layouts on a -90c map.  Controlling the general hallway to get it to near freezing with the rooms suppliment heated like normal worked very well. the hallway insulation section made use and captured the bled off heat a bit and created a nice buffer in cold snaps and over night.

Plus it just looks fantastic.

[attachment deleted by admin - too old]

[harkov]

i couldnt figure out why my complex wouldnt heat up??? installed 36 heaters, no luck, then i saw one of my pawns left some timber in the outer doorway!!! duh lol

That isn't supposed to vent when something is jamming a door open unless it was set to hold open in past or other error.

I attacked pictures of my test rooms.  The double inside, single outside is far less efficient than the single inside, double outside.  It takes a little to warm up, but once the outer hallway gets a little bit of heat, the room is perfectly comfortable as seen here.  It doubles in that if you have a cell of rooms like this with just the external double wall with airlock, it keeps the hallways a comfortable temperature.

There was a surprising difference between the two different layouts in the first picture.  The room on the right side bled heat faster and hallway was cooler.  The left image, and the four room sample one is the most energy and material efficient design in the testing.

I tested these layouts on a -90c map.  Controlling the general hallway to get it to near freezing with the rooms suppliment heated like normal worked very well. the hallway insulation section made use and captured the bled off heat a bit and created a nice buffer in cold snaps and over night.

Plus it just looks fantastic.

Are you only heating them during the day? I'm surprised it wouldn't cool down completely over night.

[b0rsuk]

If I remember correctly, rooms with ice floor are inherently clean! And like with all natural floors, you can't bring dirt into them. Good for hospitals, the only downside is slow walking speed.

[hwfanatic]

The thing with double walls that I have noticed is that you need to completely enclose the room like that or it won't work. Leaving even one tile with a single wall will be practically the same as the whole wall being single. The only exception being the door for obvious reasons. Material does not matter, so you can use cheap materials on one of the sides.

The other thing I have noticed is that airlocks help immensely in preventing leakage. A simple 1x5 corridor, with double walls and auto doors on each side, works well for me in extreme biomes.

And last observation is that keeping the base cool is a much heavier task than keeping it warm. For various reasons really. For starters, it is cheaper to build and uses less electricity. Next, if there is a geyser near your base, you can use it to further decrease these costs, and they also help mitigate solar flares and short-circuit events. And last, but not least, you can dump the heat out of your fridge and into an outer hallway (as people have already mentioned) effectively creating a buffer, further decreasing energy and material use. You can't do this in the desert, or sometimes not even in the summer in temperate biomes.

So, an example would be (and my current base uses this layout, only without the air locks):

Code Select Expand


    ww_ww   
    ww ww   
    ww ww    airlock
    ww ww   
wwwwww_wwwwww
wwwwww wwwwww
             
             buffer
             
wwwww↑↑↑wwwww
wwwwwcccwwwww
     ↑↑↑     fridge, rooms


[Ghizmo]

Thanks everyone for your input!
This'll surely help in my design. Now to figure out how to fix it on my already existing colony that is seriously struggling

[b0rsuk]

The examples shown above are almost perfect. Almost, because there are no vents. Vents let you use coolers or heaters more efficiently. And - something that may not be obvious at first - you can connect two rooms with two or more vents, that way heat is distributed more evenly.

Vents are a security hole, being flammable and only having 100 HP. Fortunately enemies are too stupid to target them.

[Vaporisor]

Are you only heating them during the day? I'm surprised it wouldn't cool down completely over night.

Those were fast tests with dev mode.  The screenshots were from a discussion in past about extreme cold biome designs so I was just doing experimenting.  The map was set to infinite power so the solar panel actually didn't do anything.  I wanted to test the buffer zone style of heating and try to find a both power and material efficient way to do the walls.

[b0rsuk]

I don't know how to use devmode, but could someone please check if there's a difference between 1 tile thick and 2 tile thick walls in terms of insulation ? The idea that thicker walls isolate better pops up every now and then, but I don't see the results.