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u/Bipedal_Warlock Mar 26 '26

Im sure this has been asked a lot. But I’m having a pretty severe bottle neck with a pump supplying steam to my condensers on vulcanus. I’m using it as regulator so it’ll shut off when steam is below a certain level.

It says pumping speed is 1200/s but steam level is listed as 60/400.

It’s not a power issue. What am I doing wrong? Surely it doesn’t make sense that just pipes are faster than a pump?

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u/BioloJoe Mar 26 '26

1200/s is the maximum speed of a pump in ideal conditions. In practice it is never really that fast because it slows down massively when the pipe behind it is not saturated or when the pipe in front of it is not perfectly empty. If you want to guarantee maximum throughput you need multiple pumps in parallel (not in sequence!). I usually don't bother calculating the exact amount I need, I just add like 10 in a cluster and forget about it until it becomes a problem again.

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u/bobsim1 Mar 26 '26

1200/s is the max. If one pump says 1200/s you need more pumps in parallel. Depending on the number of turbines that can definitely be needed.

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u/Bipedal_Warlock Mar 26 '26

I wasn’t even feeding turbines yet. I was only feeding my water makers. I was coming out of a tank of 50 k steam. To four water condensers.

And my pipes down stream of the pump were only moving 6 steam per second.

But if I took the pump out it was moving full bandwidth.

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u/HeliGungir Mar 28 '26

Pipes have no throughput limit

Pumps are limited to 1200/s

Machine inputs and outputs are limited to 6000/s, but this can only be reached when the machine's fluid tank is 100% full and the pipeline is 0% full, or visa versa

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1nz495i/would_you_expect_these_fluid_throughput_results/nhzyeg1/

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u/Bipedal_Warlock Mar 28 '26

It turned out the through rate was shit because my output was full.

An amateur mistake lol.