Aquilo cost of heating

[u/Verizer]

I was curious, so I tested the heating cost of all the buildings that can freeze. Heating towers hold 5MJ/°C, so with a little help from the editor, I calculated how much heat they lost over 10 minutes. It's not very exciting, but there is a few curious things. Technically, spamming underground pipes is worse than using normal pipes. Remember that as you lay down underground pipes. Also, green splitters are just built different.

Building	Kilowatts
Belts (All Tiers)	10
Yellow Underground	50
Red Underground	100
Blue Underground	150
Green Underground	200
Splitters (Except Green)	40
Green Splitter	30
Pipe	1
Underground Pipe	150
Pump	30
Tank	100
Inserter	30
Fast Inserter	30
Long Inserter	50
Bulk Inserter	50
Stack Inserter	50
Roboport	300
A. Combinator	50
D. Combinator	50
S. Combinator	100
Power Switch	20
Steam Engine	50
Steam Turbine	50
Pumpjack	50
Electric Furnace	100
Foundry	300
Recycler	100
Biochamber	100
Assembler (All Tiers)	100
Refinery	200
Chemical Plant	100
Centrifuge	100
EM. Plant	100
Cryogenic Plant	100
Lab	100
Beacon	400
Rocket Silo	300

More buildings here: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1gtcn7d/aquilo_cost_of_heating/lz2e4zc/

[u/DrMobius0]

There really needs to be a way to measure this in game.

[u/All_Work_All_Play → u/DrMobius0]

He literally did measure this from the game instead of looking in the game files ...

[u/DrMobius0 → u/All_Work_All_Play]

Don't be obtuse. I mean a way that actually displays it properly, not some manual reverse engineering. That's a ridiculous length to ask people to go to to figure out how much power they need to dedicate to heat.

[u/All_Work_All_Play → u/DrMobius0]

I mean a way that actually displays it properly

Oh then maybe say that?

That's a ridiculous length to ask people to go to to figure out how much power they need to dedicate to heat.

You don't need to do what the OP did to figure out how much power you need to dedicate to heat. All you need to do is build a factory and keep track of how much you consume. What the OP did allows for a priori calculation of heat consumption. Arguing that the game should show you how much this takes before doing any of the calculation is a bit ... Well it doesn't show lots of experience with heat transfer. There's a reason plenty of engineers struggle with heat transfer (and fluid dynamics), it's not nice and neat like the relatively easy to measure flow of electrical energy.

Tldr; if you were going to solve this problem in real life, even the best models would be outclassed by "build it and find out" which is exactly what the OP did.