Super Simple Wall Hack

[Inacayal Tanoesoedibjo]

EditMany people are asking about the total transformation of the room. Like I mentioned, this post is regarding the SPONGE WALL portion, but if you're interested, I've also shared a board and batten tutorial here.

Another bonus to this simple how to paint an accent wall DIY is that you can use things you probably already have in your home (quarantine win!). I'm sure most of us have an old can of paint laying around, and an extra kitchen sponge.

For this project, as per usual, I went to the hardware store and purchased a bunch of pine. I went home and made all my cuts. Then I tested the stain. And, as I should have known, it looked terrible (see above.)

So then I stood in my basement brainstorming all the ways I could make this project work without going back to the hardware store. I looked at the birch plywood left over from the kitchen floor. I looked at all the 100 year old trim I pulled down when putting up cabinets. And I decided I could do this.

The first method is sturdier, given that you can get your screw into a stud or are using some sort of molly or toggle bolt. However, you end up having a visible screw that must be disguised in some way.

Options include painting the screw a wood-ish color, or countersinking it and wood-filling and staining over it. The wood fill/stain option looks nice, but makes it near-impossible to remove the organizer from the wall, so you better be sure you never, ever need to take it down.

I made two and used one to file receipts as I came in the door, and the other to store coupons from mailers that I might actually use. What would you use an organizer like this for? Tell me in the comments below! And if you love organizers, check out my super simple drawer organizer!

So in the course of my crusade to extract as much water out of my asteroid as humanly possible i looked into the many, many sour gas boiler designs floating round the forums and the internet, and yet very little of it struck me as practical. Most designs have some special feature focus such as trying to make the system (up to natural gas output, usually ignoring pumps and always ignoring natural gas generators) as compact as possible, or making use of fancy tricks and clever exploits to the point of obscure and inexplicable build contortions and small easily-missed hidden items that the entire build will explode without.

As simple and straightforward as this is, some pieces will be non-obvious to those not already familiar with sour gas boiler design, and so i will annotate the pieces and then go over them clearly one by one.

This combined system can be referred to as a bead pump heat exchanger. The thermal interface medium (3) consists of automation ribbon, radiant liquid pipes, and radiant gas pipes. The materials are not greatly important, but the higher the thermal conductivity, the better. Here i used steel for the radiant gas pipes, and copper for the automation ribbon and radiant liquid pipes. This is an effective combination which uses minimal material. The falling oil beads will actively pump sour gas out of this section, creating a high pressure area at (8).

The heat exchanger here uses conveyor bridges to share heat between incoming sour gas and outgoing natural gas. Diamond window tiles separated by insulated tiles assist heat conduction horizontally while impeding it vertically. The material of the conveyor bridges is not greatly important and even copper ore will work, but here i used steel for generally good thermal conduction.

Both heat exchangers (3) and (9) could be made much shorter with the addition of more thermal exchange media and the use of more highly conductive materials, but this form factor fits well, is easy to construct and explain, looks good, and is mostly clear at a glance.

Natural gas is pumped by steel pumps at (12) to the 25 natural gas generators in the main steam room (13). It is not strictly necessary to have these all in a big steam room. But it is both simple and effective, and so i consider it 20t of steel well spent. Average generator use is about 24.7 out of 25, giving 19.75kW of gross power and creating around 1666g/s polluted water which is allowed to fall into the steam room. Heat from the generators will eventually rise to a point where this water is boiled immediately, turning into 99% steam and 1% dirt. The dirt is collected by auto-sweepers and shipped out. The steam is processed by two mostly-self-cooled steam turbines (14) before either being recycled to maintain steam pressure at around 10kg/tile, or sent directly out. Of this 1650g/s of eventual water, 1kg/s can be sent back to cover the operation of the input oil well, leaving 650g/s net water gain.

Two self-cooled steam turbines is not quite enough to handle the heat output of 25 natural gas generators along with the occsional dumped heat from the aquatuner, so the briefly-mentioned sulphur from sour gas condensation is passed through the turbine chamber before being ejected. During stable operation this raises the sulphur from around -70C at the top of (9) to a nice tepid 25-30C at output. The two self-cooled turbines could be replaced by one turbine and one steel aquatuner, but it looks neater this way and if you are playing Spaced Out that sulphur will be easier to use at room temperature.

Before use, the walls of the condenser should first be cooled so as to avoid flaking liquid methane into natural gas. This is the reason for the very important radiant pipe segments inside the insulated walls at the lowest level of the condenser. This will dump a lot of heat into the main steam chamber, which should either be primed with steam, or have a temporary heat dump of some sort touching the thermal interface plate.

For the lazy and impatient, the condenser can be cooled and the oil can be boiled at the same time. A hydrosensor at (4) blocks oil input when 200kg of oil is waiting to boil. An atmo sensor in (10) blocks the oil input when 10 kg/tile of sour gas is waiting to condense. This will create more excess cooling than heat, and thus minimal heat will be dumped into the main steam chamber. As such you can just straight up start shoving oil into the thing from cold and it should eventually work. But it may produce a lot of natural gas inside the condenser while starting up, and some may need to be crushed using the door crusher at (8) if it refuses to clear once the condenser cools enough to start recondensing it.

There's not actually much that can go wrong. If the input oil is interrupted (which it will be as oil wells need pressure relieved) the large mass of sour gas will simply condense more and more slowly as pressure decreases. It can go up to a cycle with no input before power generation drops to a point where it needs to be jump started.

During initizlization sulphur may melt as it travels up the heat exchanger (9). This is not a huge problem as it simply falls back down into the condenser. It may boil some methane and produce natural gas, which can either be crushed at (8) or avoided by disabling the conveyor loader until operation is stable.

If a gas lighter than steam is caught in the steam chamber, it can interfere with the pressure sensor, causing steam to build up forever. Well... just don't let this happen. If the possibility worries you, you can add a gas element sensor next to it and attach it to an alarm for if it ever fails to say "steam". It's also possible to put the atmo sensor near the bottom of the steam chamber where there is some free space.

I don't think i used any but let me know if something isn't obvious. I did put one tempshift plate in the main steam chamber touching the thermal interface plate (7). This was useful to spread heat during testing, but may be irrelevant during normal operation.

The vent in the steam chamber drips onto a heavi-watt plate. This is useful to keep the lower half of the chamber nice and hot for boiling the polluted water which all drips down there. An alternative could be to drip it next to the thermal interface plate to help that stay cool. The whole row of insulated tiles under the gas pumps is just space-filler, so the vent can go anywhere there.

The transformers at the bottom of the chamber feed three internal circuits. One for the tepidizer, one for the aquatuner and condenser, and one for the pumps and declogger. As the pumps are running most of the time, they are supplemented by the steam turbine output, which will be about 700W under stable operation.

Well the easy answer there is that you should go and get some. But i did actually manage to make a pre-space version using a magma spike for boiling the oil and liquid methane inside a two-aquatuner coolant loop for condensing the sour gas. I needed to prime it using 10% water packets to condense the initial 500kg of liquid methane. Flush the 10% water, replace with the methane, et voil, liquid-methane-condensed liquid methane. Maybe i'll polish it later and do a writeup. And on my second try, i only broke two pipes!

In conclusion, while this isn't the most compact, the most efficient, the highest volume, the most material-lean, etc etc etc, this is a very simple and straightforward boiler. I hope it helps explain the concepts to some who maybe haven't tried to make one of these or were driven off by the complexity of other designs. It nicely creates a closed system with a single oil well, and all you need are the materials to make it and some patience to deal with putting it all together and fixing what few small problems can crop up. Let me know if you have anything to add, or know of some other good simple designs!

2. I can't understand why people immerse tepidizer into super coolant, you can achieve same effect with water or petroleum or any other liquid. Just lay pipes inside of doors, and make this doors "touch" liquid.

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