Liquid Reservoir

Liquid Reservoir is a liquid storage building that accepts piped liquids and can be used to buffer, route, and condition fluid supplies. It is especially useful when a colony wants a stable reservoir between production and consumption, since it lets liquids be held in bulk instead of moving continuously through pipes. Deconstructing a Liquid Reservoir causes its contents to drop in bottled form, which makes it useful for supplying buildings that require liquids but do not accept piped input, such as the Exosuit Forge.

One of its main advantages is that it averages the temperature of incoming liquid, smoothing out spikes and making downstream temperature control easier. Because a reservoir can hold more liquid than a single pipe segment, it can also act as a buffer for coolant loops and reduce the need for elaborate Liquid Bridge arrangements to keep coolant circulating. A liquid meter on the building can be set between 0 kg and 500 kg, with a minimum nonzero setting of 0.001 kg.

• Storing liquids in reservoirs is more energy-efficient than repeatedly pumping them around.
• A full surface tile of Water or Polluted Water weighs 1000 kg, so one reservoir can hold roughly five surface tiles of water in six tiles of space.
• Liquid can also occupy the tiles the reservoir itself takes up, bringing capacity to about 11000 kg of water in that same space.
• This space advantage is less favorable for Crude Oil, while storing Petroleum in a reservoir is actually more space-efficient.
• Tile-filling storage makes access harder for Duplicants.

The Liquid Reservoir can also be used for temperature management in unusual ways. It appears to be heavily insulating in practice, and when placed in vacuum it can store very hot or very cold liquids without noticeably heating or cooling the surroundings. However, the liquid inside still exchanges heat, and that exchange is tied to the tile directly below the output port. If that tile and the space beneath it are vacuum, including a vacuum created with an Airflow Tile or Mesh Tile, there is effectively no heat exchange. This makes it possible to store liquids at extreme temperatures safely.

For germ control, placing a Liquid Reservoir in Chlorine will quickly kill germs in its contents, making it a practical tool for cleaning contaminated water from lavatory and sink systems. A common setup uses three reservoirs in sequence over Mechanized Airlocks, with automation cycling the airlocks so the liquid spends half a cycle in each reservoir, allowing germs time to die off.

The building can be disabled by a Duplicant, which stops output while still allowing input. It can also be disabled automatically by destroying the base it rests on; only one tile of the reservoir needs to sit above an open Mechanized Airlock for this to work.

Liquid Resin can also be processed through a Liquid Reservoir-related workflow to produce Isoresin by heating it to 125°C, where it splits into 25% Isoresin and 75% steam. It is important not to rely on bottle emptiers for this process, since the conversion can produce incorrect percentages. A more reliable method is to split the liquid into 1000 g packets, pipe them through a heating section that crosses the phase-change temperature, and let the liquid convert in-pipe or immediately on release.