Electric heat
Heat and boil water with a Clock and a wire.
A pulse of electricity that reaches the dead end of a wire has nowhere to go, and it leaves heat where it stops. A Clock pulsing a metal wire that ends inside a tank is a heater with no fire, no smoke and no fuel to feed. It is the easiest way to boil water.
What you need
- A Clock: 3 Copper at the anvil.
- A wire of Copper, drawn as ordinary material. Iron, steel, bronze, gold, titanium, tungsten and Graphene conduct too.
- Something to heat: usually a tank of Water.
Build a heater
- Place the Clock. Every conductor touching its edge receives its pulses.
- Draw the wire from the Clock to where you want the heat, and end it inside the thing you are heating. The heat is left at the end of the wire, not along it.
- Open the Clock and set it to every 6 frames, its fastest. At the default 60 frames a heater barely warms anything.
- Make the wire wider. A pulse travels as one spark per cell of the wire's width, and every one of them leaves heat at the end. A wire three cells wide heats three times as fast as a single strand.
Copper works best. Iron heats about a fifth slower.
How fast it boils, measured in an open tank 61 cells wide and 51 deep:
| Wire | Clock | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Copper, 1 cell wide | every 60 frames | barely warms |
| Copper, 3 cells wide | every 60 frames | about 27 °C, never boils |
| Copper, 3 cells wide | every 6 frames | steam after about 90 seconds |
| Copper, 7 cells wide | every 6 frames | steam after about 30 seconds |
| Iron, 3 cells wide | every 6 frames | steam after about 110 seconds |
A smaller tank boils sooner. Water conducts heat well, so the whole tank warms, not only the water by the wire.
Example: turning coal into fuel
Coal touching Steam becomes Fuel. An electric boiler makes that steam:
- Heat a tank of water with a copper wire as above.
- Above the tank, rest the coal on a floor of Sieve cells. A sieve stops powder but lets liquids and gases through, so the coal stays put while the steam rises up through the mesh into it.
- Each coal cell that turns into Fuel is now a liquid, and drips down through the sieve. Pipe or channel it into a fuel tank.
Coal only gets past the sieve once it has been converted, so the tank fills with fuel and nothing else.
When it goes wrong
Nothing gets warm. Check the Clock is set to 6 frames and that the wire actually touches the Clock's edge. The heat appears only where the wire ends, so a wire that loops back into itself or ends in open air heats the wrong place.
The wire melted. Water holds the wire end at about 100 °C while it lasts. Once the tank boils dry, the end keeps heating. Copper melts at 175 °C, iron at 200 °C and steel at 210 °C. Graphene never melts, which makes it the wire for a heater that runs dry.
Something exploded. An overloaded wire end that reaches 212 °C arcs and blows apart. Keep the end in water, use a slower clock, or use a thinner wire.
The heat leaked into the walls. Metal and stone carry heat away. Build the tank from something that conducts poorly, such as Ceramic, if you want the heat to stay in the water. See How heat behaves.
Next
Circuits covers the Clock and the other devices that work with signals.