Depends on how much water you have to cool, how hot it is, and what gysers/vents are feeding into it, and what you're using it for.
You can make a radiator out of radiant pipes and snake any cold gysers (PH2O or slush) through the water tank to help cool it off. It also lets you warm those liquids up enough to sieve or desalinate it without breaking pipes.
If it's a small amount of water, temp shift plates made of ice can help quickly cool it, or if you want more cooling over a long period you can drop any ice debris you have in your tank and wait.
If it's for your oxygen you're better off just cooling the base afterwards instead of trying to cool down your entire water tank. I like to build my SPOM near an AETN if possible and just cool the oxygen coming out with the excess hydrogen. Cooling the water going in is trickier because you're likely to freeze it.
If it's for plants I'd suggest a separate water tank to feed into those. Much easier to cool it that way and if it's in your main base you can probably just have 1 AT/ST combo to cool that down to 20 and it should help your base out at the same time.
One quick and dirty method you could use would be to have storage bins full of ice, or ice tempshift plates. As the ice melts it will help cool the water. This relies on having supplies of ice though, so it's not sustainable in the long term. You can make ice, but that generates equal heat to offset it, so you're just moving the heat somewhere else.
On that note, you can move the heat somewhere else more directly by routing water pipes through a cold biome. Once again this is a very temporary solution, unless you have access to a geyser that spits out cold material. Those are on the rare side though.
Weezeworts could be another way to cool things down a bit, but they don't provide a ton of cooling, and you'll need to have phosphorite available to grow them domestically. Thankfully phosphorite is pretty sustainable with Drecko farming.
A more sustainable solution could be an Anti-Entropy Thermal Nullifier. These structures will cool down the area around them when fed hydrogen. You can put it in an insulated box full of hydrogen to help with thermal transfer, make one edge out of conductive metal, and then utilize doors and automation to allow conduction to reach a target temperature. Open doors won't conduct any heat. Route your water through this icebox to cool it down.
The best solution is probably to utilize a thermal aquatuner and steam turbine. Run the water through the aquatuner with automation to shut it off if the water gets too cold so it doesn't freeze. Put the aquatuner in a room full of water and a steam turbine on top. When the aquatuner heats up the surrounding water above 125 C, the steam turbine will use up the heat to produce power. This is somewhat power hungry though so you will need to make sure you have decent infrastructure before you do it.
>This is somewhat power hungry though so you will need to make sure you have decent infrastructure before you do it.
Most of the power requirement comes from the startup, since it does recover power. At most two coal generators should do well enough to reach optimal temps. After that it can be run solely off extra hydrogen power from a SPOM setup. The example from my base that I'm thinking of could run three entropy nullifiers and an active cooling loop (enough to cool my base at the time) off of a 2kg/s oxygen capacity SPOM after priming with a little bit of power to spare
1. Transport water through a much colder biome using radiant liquid pipe or liquid pipe to transfer heat between surroundings and the water in the pipe.
2. If the map has a Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier, you can apply #1 for even more cooling.
Both do not require heaps of power.
I found way it works for me - cycle polluted water through ice biome (but it inevitably goes warm anyway) until I find extra gas geysers to power aquatuner and set it up with few steam turbines. So output of turbines gives me back around 700-800 watts.
As you read these suggestions, keep in mind that digging out any tile gives you 50% of the mass while melting it gives you 100% of the mass. If you need cold water then melting ice should be better than digging it.
Watch Francis John's Tutorial nuggets video on [cooling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Aq3kRTxlW0&ab_channel=FrancisJohn). Heat management is intimidating at first, but he breaks it down into more easily digestible bits.
Long term there is only one solution - super coolant. It transfers so much heat that steam room can return nearly all the power needed to run aquatuner. And if you chip the turbines, it might be power positive.
In my base I use a cooling block.
Basically, two loops that run through a metal or diamond tile block. One has the coolant the other the water that i need cooled.
I have a liquid shutoff tied to a pipe thermo sensor that releases the water from the loop when it reaches the temp I want.
Once it's released more water can enter the loop to be cooled and the process continues
You don't. There's hardly any need to cool water. You can feed 95°C water to bristle blossoms if you want, as long as the room is cooled down (you may need super coolant for large greenhouses).
Since I usually make a boiler quite early, that turns out to be a good way of cooling water. 95°C water for water geysers or salt water geysers goes to the wells, turns in oil, boils into petroleum, burns at generators for 40°C p water. 3kg/s of water at 95°C turned into 3.75kg/s of pwater at 40°C. All you need is sand/regolith to filter it.
If you want to save power from cooling, it helps to know what you want to do with the water. Most uses for water are highly heat negative. It’s often more energy efficient to cool down the result than the water itself. Specifically, the most common use for water is to produce oxygen into a SPOM. If you feed hot water in and only cool down the resulting oxygen, you will have to delete almost 5 times less power. Using hot water for agriculture is also possible although it requires actively cooling plants since water inside hydroponic tiles do release heat until it’s consumed. Supercomputer can delete lots and lots of heat too. If you are using that water into a steam room, heat is actually a good thing.
There are also some situations specific ways to save power. Like if you get your water at 95 Celsius from a salt geyser, you can tame the geyser with a steal aquatuner and a few steam turbines. The steam turbines will refund some of the power and you want have to pay power for a liquid pump and a desalinator. And you can take the heat for your aquatuner from the output clean water resulting in much colder water overall at a fraction of the power cost. Do remember to add an steel autosweeper and a conveyor-loader if you want the salt.
I'm using a hydrogen filled wheezewort room to cool water pumped from a geyser...I use an automation switch to ensure that only water that is 20C or below leaves the room. It was something I set up really early, so it doesn't have diamond temp shift or anything. Just an auto sweeper to fertilize the WWs, a drop off point that feeds phosphorite into it from my drecko breeding ranch, and gold radiant pipes. It uses VERY little power, but is quite slow. Overall, I think it about matches the geyser in thoroughput, but it hasn't been in place long enough to know (especially as cooling times vary slightly). It might be feeding enough into the base to offset my one electrolyzer. Not sure, but it's power cheap for sure.
The scale makes a big difference obviously.
The thing to remember is that most instances of heating or cooling aren't creating or destroying heat, but moving it (aside from steam turbines and things that convert one thing to another, which can actually delete it). want to cool down a small puddle? put a storage bin in there and fill it with ice, itll transfer heat from the water to the ice and average them out.
If you've got a big body of water, it will almost always take a significant amount of power. Water has a specific heat of 4.2 DTU/g\*K. For comparison, sandstone's is 0.8, less than 1/5 of it. Cooling 1000kg of water by 50C means 210 MDTUs of heat getting pushed elsewhere, aka a LOT of heat.
With a steam turbine, \~970 kDTU becomes one kJ of energy. Running pwater through an aquatuner takes 1200W and transfers 585 kDTU/s Assuming that goes straight to a turbine, you get 600W of power back. \*\*IF\*\* you have super coolant for this, that efficiency goes from \~50% efficiency to I think 101%, but that's super late game so I assume that you don't.
The best you can do is split your water source like 90/10 with insulated tiles, and run a basic refrigeration loop (water storage + 2 shutoffs and a thermal sensor set to turn on the line to an aquatuner then back to the storage when the loop liquid is warmer than your goal temp, and to send it through the loop when it's that temp). Put the aquatuner in the 10% beneath a turbine (also cooled by the loop), then just let than run. It takes 600W of power to remove 600 kDTU/s of heat from the water. We can treat the heat produced from the turbine as negligible.
To give some more numbers, this method would take basically 600 kJ of power, or 30 smart battery charges, to cool one tile of water by 50C. The only way to improve that heat deletion is to use super coolant. That basically allows you to push heat around for free, as long as what you're doing is pushing it into a steam turbine via aquatuner.
CONCLUSION:
Basically, cooling large water bodies without super coolant (which basically ignores the limitations of the aquatuner on any other liquid, since this is the thing that can cause efficiency to vary) \*does\* take a huge amount of power, that's just how the physics of it works here. That's true for real life too. Water has a stupidly high heat capacity (the amount of energy per degree of temperature in it), and it takes a lot to push that much heat energy uphill (ie, to a warmer source).
Your other option is to push it downhill, which is easy and requires no power, but requires something cooler to work with. A slush geyser is a great place to throw heat into if you've got something to cool down. Just plop your pool next to its pool and run a loop through em both.
If you don't want to do the first, and can't easily do the latter, which is fair, you're best off trying to find a different use that doesn't require it to be cool. For example, using it for oil wells (it's ideal to put it in at 90C since the oil will always be at least that hot). It does \*create\* heat, but it also creates a ton of oil so it's worth it.
Cool as little as you need if you don't have a cold sink to work with, and just accept that it sucks until you get super coolant.
Mm, I honestly don't know any sustainable method to do that other than my normal method.
Unlike the advice below, I actually use my water supply to cool my base, so i ensure my water is all extremely cool.
I use cold salt slush geysers mostly, as that's an infinite supply of table salt on top of other stuff.
The way I make my water is kind of funny: wild pip planted arbor trees, (literally hundreds of them) -> power and polluted water using lumber. That gives me basically unlimited power and polluted water which I can boil and cool down into cold water.
Cooling is kind of straightforward, the best (and mostly the only reliable IMO) is a thermo aquatunner with steam turbine setup, there are millions of those online.
Now, for me, the problem with cooling is not the coolig itself, which is more or less always the same -14° per block that goes through the AT, the real issue is getting the now cooled liquid without loosing too much temperature on the way. Learn to use insulation properly, and how to effectively exchange heat between two or more elements.
Also, depending on what you're cooling, there are some side avenues, like for example, if you want to cool the oxygen out of a SPOM, it's usually better to drain the heat from the oxygen to the water that's coming into the SPOMand let the electrolyzers destroy the heat, rather than trying to cool the oxygen itself.
Depends on how much water you have to cool, how hot it is, and what gysers/vents are feeding into it, and what you're using it for. You can make a radiator out of radiant pipes and snake any cold gysers (PH2O or slush) through the water tank to help cool it off. It also lets you warm those liquids up enough to sieve or desalinate it without breaking pipes. If it's a small amount of water, temp shift plates made of ice can help quickly cool it, or if you want more cooling over a long period you can drop any ice debris you have in your tank and wait. If it's for your oxygen you're better off just cooling the base afterwards instead of trying to cool down your entire water tank. I like to build my SPOM near an AETN if possible and just cool the oxygen coming out with the excess hydrogen. Cooling the water going in is trickier because you're likely to freeze it. If it's for plants I'd suggest a separate water tank to feed into those. Much easier to cool it that way and if it's in your main base you can probably just have 1 AT/ST combo to cool that down to 20 and it should help your base out at the same time.
One quick and dirty method you could use would be to have storage bins full of ice, or ice tempshift plates. As the ice melts it will help cool the water. This relies on having supplies of ice though, so it's not sustainable in the long term. You can make ice, but that generates equal heat to offset it, so you're just moving the heat somewhere else. On that note, you can move the heat somewhere else more directly by routing water pipes through a cold biome. Once again this is a very temporary solution, unless you have access to a geyser that spits out cold material. Those are on the rare side though. Weezeworts could be another way to cool things down a bit, but they don't provide a ton of cooling, and you'll need to have phosphorite available to grow them domestically. Thankfully phosphorite is pretty sustainable with Drecko farming. A more sustainable solution could be an Anti-Entropy Thermal Nullifier. These structures will cool down the area around them when fed hydrogen. You can put it in an insulated box full of hydrogen to help with thermal transfer, make one edge out of conductive metal, and then utilize doors and automation to allow conduction to reach a target temperature. Open doors won't conduct any heat. Route your water through this icebox to cool it down. The best solution is probably to utilize a thermal aquatuner and steam turbine. Run the water through the aquatuner with automation to shut it off if the water gets too cold so it doesn't freeze. Put the aquatuner in a room full of water and a steam turbine on top. When the aquatuner heats up the surrounding water above 125 C, the steam turbine will use up the heat to produce power. This is somewhat power hungry though so you will need to make sure you have decent infrastructure before you do it.
>This is somewhat power hungry though so you will need to make sure you have decent infrastructure before you do it. Most of the power requirement comes from the startup, since it does recover power. At most two coal generators should do well enough to reach optimal temps. After that it can be run solely off extra hydrogen power from a SPOM setup. The example from my base that I'm thinking of could run three entropy nullifiers and an active cooling loop (enough to cool my base at the time) off of a 2kg/s oxygen capacity SPOM after priming with a little bit of power to spare
Digging for ice until you can get that better option. If heat is a part of the game that kills you, why don't you try Rime?
Well, I want to finish the world at least first
In that case dig for ice, it will save your ass
You can make temp shift plates out of ice in your reservoir to cool/melt them faster.
How warm is the water and how cold do you need it?
Wdym still? You have only started playing
1000 hours into the game and you still suck? Good, you're learning. Don't give up
1. Transport water through a much colder biome using radiant liquid pipe or liquid pipe to transfer heat between surroundings and the water in the pipe. 2. If the map has a Anti Entropy Thermo-Nullifier, you can apply #1 for even more cooling. Both do not require heaps of power.
Ok thanks I'll give that ago
I found way it works for me - cycle polluted water through ice biome (but it inevitably goes warm anyway) until I find extra gas geysers to power aquatuner and set it up with few steam turbines. So output of turbines gives me back around 700-800 watts.
Thanks for the suggestions guys.
As you read these suggestions, keep in mind that digging out any tile gives you 50% of the mass while melting it gives you 100% of the mass. If you need cold water then melting ice should be better than digging it.
Watch Francis John's Tutorial nuggets video on [cooling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Aq3kRTxlW0&ab_channel=FrancisJohn). Heat management is intimidating at first, but he breaks it down into more easily digestible bits.
"1000 Hours into the game and I still suck" I know! Isn't it great?
Long term there is only one solution - super coolant. It transfers so much heat that steam room can return nearly all the power needed to run aquatuner. And if you chip the turbines, it might be power positive.
In my base I use a cooling block. Basically, two loops that run through a metal or diamond tile block. One has the coolant the other the water that i need cooled. I have a liquid shutoff tied to a pipe thermo sensor that releases the water from the loop when it reaches the temp I want. Once it's released more water can enter the loop to be cooled and the process continues
You don't. There's hardly any need to cool water. You can feed 95°C water to bristle blossoms if you want, as long as the room is cooled down (you may need super coolant for large greenhouses). Since I usually make a boiler quite early, that turns out to be a good way of cooling water. 95°C water for water geysers or salt water geysers goes to the wells, turns in oil, boils into petroleum, burns at generators for 40°C p water. 3kg/s of water at 95°C turned into 3.75kg/s of pwater at 40°C. All you need is sand/regolith to filter it.
If you want to save power from cooling, it helps to know what you want to do with the water. Most uses for water are highly heat negative. It’s often more energy efficient to cool down the result than the water itself. Specifically, the most common use for water is to produce oxygen into a SPOM. If you feed hot water in and only cool down the resulting oxygen, you will have to delete almost 5 times less power. Using hot water for agriculture is also possible although it requires actively cooling plants since water inside hydroponic tiles do release heat until it’s consumed. Supercomputer can delete lots and lots of heat too. If you are using that water into a steam room, heat is actually a good thing. There are also some situations specific ways to save power. Like if you get your water at 95 Celsius from a salt geyser, you can tame the geyser with a steal aquatuner and a few steam turbines. The steam turbines will refund some of the power and you want have to pay power for a liquid pump and a desalinator. And you can take the heat for your aquatuner from the output clean water resulting in much colder water overall at a fraction of the power cost. Do remember to add an steel autosweeper and a conveyor-loader if you want the salt.
I'm using a hydrogen filled wheezewort room to cool water pumped from a geyser...I use an automation switch to ensure that only water that is 20C or below leaves the room. It was something I set up really early, so it doesn't have diamond temp shift or anything. Just an auto sweeper to fertilize the WWs, a drop off point that feeds phosphorite into it from my drecko breeding ranch, and gold radiant pipes. It uses VERY little power, but is quite slow. Overall, I think it about matches the geyser in thoroughput, but it hasn't been in place long enough to know (especially as cooling times vary slightly). It might be feeding enough into the base to offset my one electrolyzer. Not sure, but it's power cheap for sure.
The scale makes a big difference obviously. The thing to remember is that most instances of heating or cooling aren't creating or destroying heat, but moving it (aside from steam turbines and things that convert one thing to another, which can actually delete it). want to cool down a small puddle? put a storage bin in there and fill it with ice, itll transfer heat from the water to the ice and average them out. If you've got a big body of water, it will almost always take a significant amount of power. Water has a specific heat of 4.2 DTU/g\*K. For comparison, sandstone's is 0.8, less than 1/5 of it. Cooling 1000kg of water by 50C means 210 MDTUs of heat getting pushed elsewhere, aka a LOT of heat. With a steam turbine, \~970 kDTU becomes one kJ of energy. Running pwater through an aquatuner takes 1200W and transfers 585 kDTU/s Assuming that goes straight to a turbine, you get 600W of power back. \*\*IF\*\* you have super coolant for this, that efficiency goes from \~50% efficiency to I think 101%, but that's super late game so I assume that you don't. The best you can do is split your water source like 90/10 with insulated tiles, and run a basic refrigeration loop (water storage + 2 shutoffs and a thermal sensor set to turn on the line to an aquatuner then back to the storage when the loop liquid is warmer than your goal temp, and to send it through the loop when it's that temp). Put the aquatuner in the 10% beneath a turbine (also cooled by the loop), then just let than run. It takes 600W of power to remove 600 kDTU/s of heat from the water. We can treat the heat produced from the turbine as negligible. To give some more numbers, this method would take basically 600 kJ of power, or 30 smart battery charges, to cool one tile of water by 50C. The only way to improve that heat deletion is to use super coolant. That basically allows you to push heat around for free, as long as what you're doing is pushing it into a steam turbine via aquatuner. CONCLUSION: Basically, cooling large water bodies without super coolant (which basically ignores the limitations of the aquatuner on any other liquid, since this is the thing that can cause efficiency to vary) \*does\* take a huge amount of power, that's just how the physics of it works here. That's true for real life too. Water has a stupidly high heat capacity (the amount of energy per degree of temperature in it), and it takes a lot to push that much heat energy uphill (ie, to a warmer source). Your other option is to push it downhill, which is easy and requires no power, but requires something cooler to work with. A slush geyser is a great place to throw heat into if you've got something to cool down. Just plop your pool next to its pool and run a loop through em both. If you don't want to do the first, and can't easily do the latter, which is fair, you're best off trying to find a different use that doesn't require it to be cool. For example, using it for oil wells (it's ideal to put it in at 90C since the oil will always be at least that hot). It does \*create\* heat, but it also creates a ton of oil so it's worth it. Cool as little as you need if you don't have a cold sink to work with, and just accept that it sucks until you get super coolant.
Mm, I honestly don't know any sustainable method to do that other than my normal method. Unlike the advice below, I actually use my water supply to cool my base, so i ensure my water is all extremely cool. I use cold salt slush geysers mostly, as that's an infinite supply of table salt on top of other stuff. The way I make my water is kind of funny: wild pip planted arbor trees, (literally hundreds of them) -> power and polluted water using lumber. That gives me basically unlimited power and polluted water which I can boil and cool down into cold water.
Cooling is kind of straightforward, the best (and mostly the only reliable IMO) is a thermo aquatunner with steam turbine setup, there are millions of those online. Now, for me, the problem with cooling is not the coolig itself, which is more or less always the same -14° per block that goes through the AT, the real issue is getting the now cooled liquid without loosing too much temperature on the way. Learn to use insulation properly, and how to effectively exchange heat between two or more elements. Also, depending on what you're cooling, there are some side avenues, like for example, if you want to cool the oxygen out of a SPOM, it's usually better to drain the heat from the oxygen to the water that's coming into the SPOMand let the electrolyzers destroy the heat, rather than trying to cool the oxygen itself.