The best setup for an electrolyzer is one that is self powered and mostly self managed. The self powered oxygen machine will provide all your oxygen needs, it is flexible in design and helps master a few key concepts.
A self powered oxygen machine or SPOM is the essential oxygen farm for every player. To get started you will need some refined gold for power, automation and smart battery.
At the heart of the SPOM are the electrolyzers. Pumping water into the electrolyzers is fairly easy once your base is established. Make sure you have plenty of water for crops and bathrooms before building this, as running out could find your dupes hungry, dirty and struggling to breath.
The goal is to self power, and system will provide enough power for 3 gas pumps , 2 electrolyzers and a gas filter.
The gas filter is optional, as the hydrogen and oxygen will separate naturally. In a compact setup sometimes oxygen gets stuck in the hydrogen flow and can damage machinery, so I like to add it in.
You will need to kick start the system, so you can temporary connect it to another power source, or use a manual generator.
Once operational gases will start to generate. Without gas pumps the electrolyzers will stop once max pressure is reached. We want to generate a lot of oxygen, so we need to pump it away.
1 gas pump for hydrogen and 2 for oxygen provides the correct balance. I like to use mesh tiles at the bottom to allow excess oxygen to flow out into the surrounding area.
Gas pumps allow hydrogen to be collected in to the generator, excess is sent off for other uses.
A gas bridge will force the gas to go into it and into the gas reservoir. If the gas bridge is blocked due to reservoir being full, then hydrogen will flow past it into an overflow pipe.
You will notice the oxygen flows around to the top with some radian gas pipes and wheezeworts. This is an optional cooling system.
A highly recommended component is a Wheezeworts cooling system. There are other ways to cool oxygen, but this is a beginner tutorial.
Cooling is fairly important, without it the machines will eventually overheat, and hot oxygen will slowly cook your dupes and food supply.
Placing Wheezeworts in the hydrogen improves overall heat transfer. You’ll need a steady flow of phosphorite, so long term you may want to consider a Glossy Drecko farm.
Sensors and wires are essential to allows the system to be self powering. Without it there is not enough hydrogen, it’s a good introduction to the wonders of automation.
The first part is to connect the hydrogen generator to a smart battery. Set the smart battery to low 10 and high 50. The gas reservoir acts as our primary energy storage, and the smart battery makes sure we power our pumps and electrolyzers.
The next setup of automation is to stop the pumps from running unnecessarily. There are many ways to build these, the most simplest to install a Gas Sensor to check for hydrogen. You can combine an Atmos Sensor with the AND Gate to check if there is a minimal amount of hydrogen.
The Atmos sensor can be set to only activate if there is 750g pressure, so it will wait until there’s a bit more hydrogen. To the hydrogen I’ve added a BUFFER Gate, this runs the pump for 5s and collects gas in a longer burst rather than many small ones (this is very optional).
The automation has been repeated for the oxygen. The sensors allow the oxygen to build up before the pumps activate, which allows the pump to move the same amount of oxygen in less operational time.
And that is all that is required to build an efficient self powered oxygen machine. The design is very flexible and it may take a few different attempts before you settle on a design you like.
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