Polluted water is useful resource, but it can also be a big problem producing polluted oxygen and making your dupes sick. Here are 5 ways to use polluted water up and one easy way to get rid of it altogether.
Filtering Into Clean Water
This ones is kind of obvious, as we generally start running polluted water through the water sieve early game. The main benefit is clean water, polluted dirt can be useful but also emits polluted oxygen.
With the polluted dirt you can compost the dirt, feed it to hatches/ pokeshell or store under water to prevent polluted air.
Farms and Plants
Farms using polluted water are typically small, several plants require polluted water, the Pincha Pepper, Thimble Reed, and Arbor Tree.
Pincha Pepper is great for improving food and will require an on going supply. Thimble Reeds provide fibre which is mostly used for clothing and the canvas furniture items, so these farms usually only need to run for a short while. Arbour trees are a optional fuel source, but produce a lot of carbon dioxide from using the lumber, so best to give these a miss in most cases.
Turn Into Fertilizer
On the subject of plants, polluted water can help your other farms. Polluted water can be pumped in to the Fetilizer Synthesizer producing fetilizer, some natural gas and heat.
Fetilizer is an on going need for regular farms to boost growth. Natural gas has it’s uses for cooking and power production. Natural gas being heavier than oxygen makes it easy to capture beneather the Fetilizer Synthesizer.
Machine Cooling
It’s possible to sit machines in 50kg of water for cooling, and polluted water is extra useful for this. Polluted water absorbs more heat than ordinary water before turning into steam, however will leave behind a dirt block.
Hydro sensors can be used to automate pipes to automatically refill polluted water. Dirt blocks can be dug up manually by dupes to free the machinery to work again, or use Robo-miners to clear blocks. The steam and over heating is a bit more of a difficult problem, maybe vent that steam into space?
Boil Into Steam
As above with machine cooling, steam can be a useful system to generate power, and extra dirt for farming is useful tool. Natural sources of heat such as volcanoes can provide a system to clean water, produce some power and dirt. This one will be a tricky build, so make sure you’ve got plenty of Ceramic Insulated Tiles ready.
Vent into spaces
If you just want get rid of polluted water, then sending it to a vacuum space tile will delete the water with no side effects. Dig a path and pipe to the top until you see the sky, place a liquid vent and let the water disappear into space.