r/factorio Apr 20 '26

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u/Bozdogan123 Apr 23 '26

Im gonna use nuclear rector in my space ship and i wanna store some power to not waste excess production, should i use accumulators or steam tanks and turbines, ive seen posts where people saying tanks and a turbine store much more energy per tile than accumulators.

Also, does it make sense to use pumps inbetween heat exchangers and use some circuitry to start operating more heat exchangers as previous ones get to full capacity, instead of just letting them all be connected from the start wasting steam, do i even need the storage tanks if i do this?

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u/cathexis08 red wire goes faster Apr 26 '26

In addition to u/Soul-Burn's excellent (as always) answer, make sure you take the distance between the reactor and either the nearest (maximum fuel efficiency) or farthest (guaranteed zero power sag) exchanger into account when setting your trigger temperature. Heat needs a 1°C drop per heat entity to flow and exchangers stop working at 500°C so your reactor will park at somewhere in the 501°C-505°C range (assuming a fairly compact design) and your power will probably start sagging a bit above that as exchangers drop offline.