?

I'd imagine feeding steam into coal cracking without burning stuff, or storing steam for nights with solar rather than using tons of accumulators.

so u use energy to create steam to create energy?

perpetuum?

Sorry, thats nonsens!
The Purpose of a Boiler IS to heat water using chemical energy => thermal&electric energy. And to use THIS water/Steams kinetic energy to generate electric energy.

U CANT use electric energy, convert it to thermal / kinetic energy to generate MORE electric energy.

get back to class!

@Speadge if this is balanced right, there should definitely be energy loss in the cycle — but it's still an effective battery (high energy density, but I would expect <50% efficiency).

@Speadge
you serious? instead insulting people, read again what you wrote and think about your life and your commitment to society. Since boilers have efficiency more or less capped at 40%, how would you want to make such system closed? Nobody really cares what mods are you using, don't like it, don't use it. If you want to be morality police, I really recommend certain groups at Barkley

I waited so long for anyone to actually make such mod and i am really grateful for it, so @Mobius, +1.

Storing energy is important, for feeding laser turrets for example. Industrial energy buffer systems use molten salt for example, or even storing (pumping) water behind dams for later use. Since electric boilers are simplest to mod, i can actually abide storing energy as steam even if its not exactly ok with general physics. When i have surplus, i.e. solar panels producing more than needed and capacitors are too expensive or have too small capacity. If you are smart enough you can even create circuitry to enable electric boilers based on your industry needs/outputs.

@esavier
im insulting noone here - just saying that there is no practical sense in using el.energy u gathered by converting chemical energy - just to heat water to generate some el. energy.
1st: if u generate more energy, u can just use a "free energy mod"
2nd: when it generates less energy, its useless.

And storing energy.. isnt that what accumulators are made for?

@Speadge
first of all i am not storing energy and then converting it to chemical. I can have for example distant solar plant that is not using all of its energy up, so i want to transport it for example by train, but up to this point factorio does not allow to store solar energy in material, transportable form - only in charge. My only option is to store part of steam before using it but this require coal or some other fuel.

also, be creative, consider unmodded vanilla 0.14, full storage tank of hot water is somewhat around 200 MJ on 3x3 area (9tiles), while 2x2 accumulator keeps charge of 5MJ on 2x2 (4tiles), now math: (for 0.14, i did not tried to appraise it with steam yet...)
- for each 36tiles, you can store either 45MJ of charge, or 800MJ of hot water.
- you are storing 200MJ in 45 iron plates-construct, or 5Mj in ~7iron+5copper, but you are using 180 iron per 36 tiles or ~63iron+45copper, larger setups means better ratio. For example to store similar energy as 1 tank you need ~200copper+280iron, and 160 tiles = waste of space and resources.
- 36-tiled capacitor can: (accumulator) discharge 2 700KJ/s, or(water) everything at once depending on your normal steam engine output, mine for example (36 tiles,10 000units of hot water) can be consumed in around 20s, which gives around 40 000KJ/s . in 0.15 factorio probably even more since there are steam turbines.

Now, to explain what i use it for: I am playing with angelsmod+bobsmod. It means that really miserable and small factory takes even up to 30MW on really calm day, and I dont even have lasers yet - only gun turrets... add some roboports in the future, lasers etc... Additionally tanks are still pretty cheap and available early, while batteries need time and work to research and make... Ah, and also i have wave or two of kickass elemental biters each night. Cutting it short - capacitor field will require space, space require security which require power, you see the loop? so for me space/capacity ratio really matters. Additional capacitor field to secure capacitor field etc... if I can make capacitor field smaller by storing water instead of charge - good, less space, less fences and turrets, less space actually needed. Also i can import hot steam by t rains which also gives me some possibilities.

now to your points:
1st: free energy mod? wut? in 0.14 I used some weird mod to generate crude oil from electricity, but ratio was weak, and felt like kind of cheating. If you have something else that is not celtic fairy magic, and is playable in multi pvp, then by all means, take me there.
2nd: I dont really understand what you mean, if you mean that efficiency is not 100%? duh, what you wrote earlier - perpetuum mobile. How would you want it to work? circuit buffer? my point is - even if this will use 10MJ to heat 5MJ of steam - thats ok, storing power in this form is still more profitable than capacitors, do the math.
3rd: if your whole network is lacking, you have circuits, disable boilers and its done. In programming and probably in other sectors there is an idea of buffering, and this water heating is exactly what it is doing with your power, on the L A R G E scale.
4th, If you can't came up with an idea or layout that would utilize electric boilers, or means to store energy, well, sucks to be you. I certainly would transform at least a quarter of my current layout, and probably came up with a lot of other uses along the way. You are held back only by your imagination.
5th, finally, as i wrote before, noone is forcing you to use it? Why are you brickwalling it?

Hello folks, the idea of this mod (not working yet, adjusting some small stuff to make it work 100%) is to make boilers behave like furnaces, you have the "burner" furnaces which uses fuel to make stuff, regular boilers takes fuel to make steam, this mod would add a new type of boiler that uses electricity to make steam, just like the electrical furnaces version of furnaces.

And that is really useful in cramped chemical parts of your factory, where you are cracking and refining oil and gasses and (bobs and angels user here) need steam to do so.
And @Speadge: maybe boiler is not the right word (I'm no native speaker) but I guess everyone of us has a device at home that makes steam out of water by using electricity ;)

nah, thats a boiler, unless you are british person, then its teapot :D
noneless, Mobius, good job, i am really waiting for this :)
https://beeroverip.org/oyster-stout/

Its working now, it'll consume 1MW of energy to produce Steam, probably won't be enough to make energy on steam machines but definatedly enough to sustain that coal liquefaction of your factory or to make angel's steam crackers working

transformator!
because the things from the transformators mod even consume energy when idle.
this doesn't
(don't build tanks to replace accumulators, that's cheating)
(edit: i released my own transformers mod, which fixed that)

Saw some people bashing the mod. Just want to say this mod is the first one I've seen that doesn't loop to an infinite source of power. Great work!

Thanks!

Personally, I use it for anything that takes steam as a recipe. Because this is a lower-power source of steam, so more efficient for recipes. A lot of the steam-hungry recipes come from mods, but I like those mods -- with our mod pack we maintain a steam network in the base like any other base fluid -- and this mod is a must have for doing that, especially during mid-game before nuclear-powered steam becomes overly abundant.

considering the heat that goes lost, this shoudltn sustain even itself.
of course its a great add-on for this and that reasons we dont spoiler here.

Problem is, vanilla boilers are 1:1, all the energy they consume they also produce in form of steam, no gain no loss. If i can find something to work around this I will surely add to the mod.

Im still having to have a normal boiler to my system because the others aren't producing steam at 60/s like the normal and they are all hooked up correctly

Have you configured in the settings the boiler to produce 1.8MW? 60u/s of steam needs 1.8MW of power if you clean installed the mod it should be 1.8 by default, if not check your mod settings page and it should be there.

yes i did and it was already set to 1.8

Do you use other mods that changes steam behaviour?

Also, by "your system" you mean steam power setup? Because if so they won't produce energy other than what they consume. The Electric boiler consumes energy to produce steam but you can't use energy to produce steam to produce energy, this closed loop has a tendency to reach 0 after time.

Also if you you're using bob's mods the electric boiler there won't produce 60u/s of steam, I need feedback on bob's users to achieve a good balance on the boilers.