RedistHeat is a mod for RimWorld that aims to give the player more options when it comes to heating and cooling including everything from multiple sizes of heaters and air conditioners to a complete ductwork system! From the Workshop page:

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Equalize temperature of every room
Build a (lockable) vents to equalize temperature between adjacent rooms. Build massive duct networks of your own and make central heating/cooling system.

Better graphics
Vents and ducts can only be built over a wall, rather than acting as one. No longer clutter your fort's walls with one-cell vents. Small cooler and medium heater, which are also wall mounting, comes with this mod.

More tools
Big bases can use industrial scale heaters and coolers for effectively keeping its temperature.

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Installation is a breeze using the Steam Workshop but do make sure you also grab CCL as it is required!

RedistHeat Workshop Page
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=728968976

CCL Workshop Page
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=729577707

So you have the mod installed and are wondering where to start? Well first off a warning, if you use this mod on an existing world you may run into issues ranging from simple things like you vanilla vents/heaters/etc disappearing to being unable to load the world. Highly recommended to use this on a new colony!

Got a new colony all loaded up? Great! Let's check out the items first. Some of these are fairly obvious but I'll list them all just in case and we'll cover how they are used further down.


The following items are located in the Temperature tab:

• Small Heater - This is mostly identical to the vanilla "heater"
  
• Medium Cooler - This is mostly identical to the vanilla "cooler"
  
• Small Cooler - Smaller version of the cooler, wall mount!
  
• Medium Heater - Medium size heater
  
• Industrial Heater - Super size heater
  
• Industrial Cooler - Super size cooler
  
• Exhaust Port - Used by the industrial cooler to vent hot exhaust
  
• Vent - Same as the vanilla vent but prettier
  
• Active Vent - Like a vent but can be can set a desired temperature of target room
  
• Vent - Same as the vanilla vent but prettier

The following items are located in the Ductwork tab:

• Duct-Pipe Upper - used to create duct network
  
• Duct-Pipe Lower - used to create duct network
  
• Duct Outlet - lets air out of the duct into the target room
  
• Smart Duct Outlet - lets air out of the duct into the target room but can set desired temperature for the room and duct will attempt to open/close itself to maintain that temperature
  
• Duct Intake - lets air into the duct system
  
• Duct Cooler - inline cooler to lower temperature in the duct system

Before we get into ductwork, let's talk about the basic items in this pack and how they can make your life better!

So in vanilla RimWorld your options to keep things warm/cool for your pawns is limited to heater, cooler, campfire and the basic vent. Does it work? Sure but, if it worked great you wouldn't be interested in RedistHeat and reading this guide!

At the most basic level you can use the core items in this mod in almost the exact same way that you use the vanilla heater/cooler/vent.

Small/Medium Heater: Place in the room you wish to heat and set the desired temperature. You set the temperature by clicking on the device and adjusting the dials identical to how vanilla works. Assuming you have enough heating power to heat the room, it will eventually reach the set temperature and stay there. Not getting warm enough in the room? Add another heater! Heaters have no exhaust requirements. The small heater can be placed anywhere but the medium heater must be attached to a wall. As you rotate the medium heater you will see the room it will heat light up with a "red" outline indicating it is the target.

Small/Medium Cooler: These work identical to heaters except you need to handle their exhaust output as they output heat to make that cold, cold air. When you place these items, just like the vanilla cooler, you need to orient the blue box into the room you want to cool and the red box into, well, anything else. Blue area gets cold air, red area gets exhaust heat. Note that both small and medium coolers are placed on walls just like the vanilla cooler and you set the temperature the exact same way.

Vent: This is a vent. Works identical to vanilla vents to allow air to flow between two rooms. The temperature will attempt to equalize between the two rooms automatically. This is very basic way of sharing the heat/cold from one room into a several instead of having to place a heater/cooler in every single room. Keep in mind the more rooms you connect with vents, the more overall "load" you place on your heater/cooler and it may not be able to keep up to hold the desired temperature. Also because vents are dumb glorified holes in the wall, the rooms the air is shared with will vary in temperature a bit from the source room that has the heater/cooler. Vents do not require power to operate.

Active Vent: Same as above but you can set the desired temperature for the receiving room. As you place the active vent, aim the orange side into the room you want "controlled" and be sure to set the desired temperature. Much like the vent is a glorified hole in the wall, this is a hole in the wall with a brain! The active vent will open or close itself as needed to attempt to keep the set temperature in the room. Active vents require power to operate.



Industrial Heater: This item really operates identical to a standard heater but is able to put out more heater. How much more? Want to cook a pawn? There are no special placement rules so you can place one of these really anywhere you want much like the small heater [or the vanilla heater] and set the desired temperature. If the room isn't too big, the heater will raise the temperature of the room to match. We'll discuss more advanced uses for this in the duct section. You can see four of these portable infernos in the picture above on the left side. Note I have the door forbidden as it is ~250F that room.

Industrial Cooler: This is the King Frigid Zero Cool Deluxe cooling unit for your base! This baby will get you sub-zero temperatures super fast but has some oddities about it that most people trip up on. You can place the industrial cooler anywhere you like tho do note it has a couple blue boxes in front of it, that's where the cold air comes out. The coolers are the large white units on the top-right side of the screenshot. Note that the industrial cooler needs exhaust ports attached to function!

Exhaust Ports: The industrial cooler puts out a lot of heat and you need to deal with that somehow. The solution is exhaust ports! You can attach these to any side of the device and they will output the heat and improve the performance of the industrial cooler. I said above they are required and while that isn't entirely true, they help improve the performance enough that you should consider them required. As you can see in the screenshot above they are the small white boxes attached to the industrial coolers. You need to rotate them until they light up to attach to the cooler. If you look closely you'll see a small gray arrow that points at the industrial cooler when connected.Since these things pull all the heat off the industrial cooler, you'll want to DO something with that heat which means venting it outside in most cases. In my example I have them on an external wall blowing the exhaust straight outside. While the industrial cooler placed on an outside wall will not "seal" properly as it leaves gaps between it and the walls, the exhaust ports will which makes setup a breeze if you have outside facing walls. Built in a mountain? No problem! You can still exhaust into a hallway, another room or really wherever you want identical to how you handle exhaust with standard coolers. Note that you can't place an exhaust port until you have placed an Industrial Cooler as it has to line up based on that object.

If you downloaded RedistHeat, ductwork is most likely the number one thing you want to use and I'll admit it's pretty cool! Ductwork also is one of the most common confusion points for folks new to the mod so I'll try to help you hit the ground running with your ductwork empire.

Basic Ductwork: Think of a duct-pipe as a transit for air. You run ductwork between rooms you want to heat/chill so your pawns won't complain about sleeping in the heat/cold or wose, suffer from hot/cold related conditions such as hypothermia. I'm looking at you "guy who only places arctic!"

Ductwork can be placed the same as power wiring and can even be in the same square as power wires making it very easy to snake around your base. I generally place my ductwork in my walls but that is entirely optional. Note that the more ductwork you have, and the more rooms connected to your system via duct outlets and smart outlets, the more heating and cooling "power" you will need to hit those desired temperatures. It is currently recommended by the mod author to break from "one duct network to rule them all" to having multiple networks in the case of large bases. This has the added benefit of being slightly easier to troubleshoot when things go wrong as well as gives you some redundancy in case one of your HVAC rooms is blow up by say... a stray mortar. Not that that ever happens...

Lower / Upper Ducts: Throughout the mod you will see references to upper and lower ductwork and upper and lower connections. What the heck is this? Basically, the author has put in lower and upper versions of ducts so that you can run two ducts in the same space. Lower ducts connect to lower ducts and upper ducts connect to upper ducts but they will not connect to eachother. In the current build of RedistHeat you'll generally run say... lower duct for heat and upper duct for cool if you want to have a fancy automatic system for hot/cold that you never need to touch. We'll discuss more later but the gist is it is two separate duct networks and your intakes/outlets will connect to either lower or upper but not both.

Duct Intake: This lets air into the system. While standard HVAC in real life would simply connect the duct directly to your furnace/AC, that's not entirely the case in RedistHeat so you need to use duct intakes to suck in cold or hot air into the ducts and feed it into your rooms using duct outlets. Note that multiple intakes increase the amount of air brought into the system so in the case of furnace/AC rooms you may need more than one intake to fully take the air from those rooms into the duct system. Note that you have to tell the intake to bind itself to either the upper or lower duct network using the "cycle channel" button, default keybind R. You can also click the "toggle airflow" button to open/close the intake manually.

Duct Outlet: You guessed it, duct outlets are the other half of duct intakes. Intakes bring air INTO the duct network and duct outlets let the air OUT. At the most basic you should have an intake in your furnace [or AC] room and an outlet in the room you want to heat/cool. Much as you sometimes need multiple intakes to pull air into the system from a room, you will need multiple outlets to get enough air out of the system into larger rooms so keep that in mind when you place a single outlet in a 20x20 room and can't figure out why it won't reach the target temperature! Keep in mind that a duct outlet is NOT temperature controlled and it will simply dump air from the duct network at whatever temperature it happens to be. Like the intake, you have to pick an upper or lower duct network and you can manually open or close an outlet using the "toggle airflow" button.

Smart Duct Outlet: These are functionally the same as duct outlets except you can set the temperature on them. For example, if you have a basic set up with industrial furnaces feeding your duct network and want your pawns to hang out in a lovely 70F room even though your duct temperature is 120F, the smart duct will automatically open to get temperature in the room up to 70F and close once it hits that. You don't have to do anything as it is all automatic! These things are sweet! Do note that like everything else, if there is not enough "power" in the ducts to accomodate the load needed to say get a room to 70F... it will still fail to do so. In the case above however, it will try to keep the temp at 70F or lower.

Gotchas: There are a number of gotchas in the current mod that catch people. Here's a few common ones:

• Not enough air in the ducts. I refer to this as "power" in other parts of the guide but basically it is the amount of hot or cold air being produced by your heaters or coolers. How to fix this? You guessed it, more heaters or coolers of any type. Just make sure the air from the added heaters/coolers is being piped into the duct system via intakes.
  
• Room not getting cold/hot enough. If it is a large room, make sure you have enough duct outlets or smart duct outlets and verify the temperature set on the later. If that all seems fine, refer to first bullet. You can always click on a duct to see the duct's actual temperature which is useful as the duct needs to generally be as hot/cold as you are hoping to have the connected room. You can overcharge your ducts such that they are much colder or hotter than you actually need and use the smart outlets to control output into rooms.
  
• Duct lines look broken around intakes/outlets. Make sure you have your intakes and outlets set to the right channel, that is, upper or lower to match your upper or lower ducts.
  
• Cooler not cooling. Coolers [of all sizes] need to be able to exhaust their heat to operate. If they are exhausting into a room that is 100F, they won't work very well so keep that in mind when placing both small/medium coolers as well as the industrial coolers and their exhaust ports which put out quite a bit of heat.
  
• Things aren't working as expected. Double check your placement of your heaters and coolers paying attention to the hot and cold zones as applicable. They will highlight the room the air will go into as you rotate them around so make sure your cooler is pushing cold air into the room you want or that your duct outlet is feeding air into the pawn's rooms and not the hallway by accident.
• Not working at all? Make sure the room you are trying to heat or cool has a ROOF on it as the air will escape. I believe having actual walls [not the raw stone but actually walls] also helps with sealing the rooms. See the other tips as well but a missing roof is the fast track to failboat city with RedistHeat.
  
• One system to rule them all. While it is possible to make one giant system to do your entire base including special areas like freezers, it's not recommended based on my experience and guidance from the mod dev. At minimum you'll want to put your freezers on a separate system from the rest of your base and you may need a few systems if you have a very large base.

So you've made it this far or just scrolled through to look at the pictures but either way, you've arrived at the pinnacle of RedistHeat, actually using the damn thing! Here are a couple basic set ups to help you get started:

Hot and Cold
Due to how smart outlets currently work, the easiest way to make a system that you can simply "set and forget" for your pawns that will both heat AND cool requires running two duct networks. Two but why?? You need one for hot and one for cold and luckily we have an upper and lower network to use for just such a purpose. Each room in this configuration will have two smart outlets both set to the same temperature so they will automatically let in heating or cooling as-needed to keep the rooms at the set temperature. You can scale this any way you like and the set up here is for demonstration only. In cooking terms, salt to taste.


So what's going on here?

You have a sealed room with 4 industrial furnaces set to a very high temperature [it's about 250F in the room hence having the door marked as forbidden as I don't need roast pawn]. We'll call this the hot room.

Next to that is a cooling room with 3 industrial coolers set to a very low temperature [0F actually] with exhaust ports [2 per unit] venting their heat to the outside. We'll call this the cold room.

The hot room contains 4 duct intakes connected to the lower duct system to pull heat from that room into the lower duct network. The cold room has 3 duct intakes connected to the upper duct network to keep the upper duct network cool.

Ok you have ducts and stuff, what now? Well the lower duct is hot and the upper duct is cold so we'll want to get this air into the rooms for the pawns. Both upper and lower ducts run in the walls as they can take up the same space and you can pick them out as one is orange and one is yellow. If you click on the same spot it will cycle through items in that square.


Same shot as above but scrolled up slightly and ductwork visible. You can see the orange [lower] ducts coming from the hot room and the yellow [upper] ducts coming from the cold room. In each room I have two smart vents both set to 70F. One lets in heat as needed while the other lets in cold as needed. Morgloz has mentioned he would like to make a unified smart vent at some point that can connect to BOTH upper and lower duct networks so you can do the "hot and cold" set up like this without needing two smart outlets per room but at time of this writing it doesn't exist yet.

The system is pretty basic but achieves the goals of having heat in winter, cooling in summer, and never, ever having to touch it. You can strip out the lower network if you don't need heat or the upper network if you don't need cooling depending on your needs.


Freezer
What is the number one thing you set up quickly in a colony? Well if you are me, or aren't playing in the arctic, I like to get a freezer going right away to put my food in so it won't spoil! Setting up a freezer with RedistHeat can be done very simply in a few different ways. As with vanilla freezers, you'll want to limit traffic in/out of the freezers and use autodoors to minimize time the doors are open which causes temperature loss.

Method 1:
Place coolers in the room just like vanilla. Make sure to vent the heat OUT of the room. You can use small, medium or even industrial coolers for this with no ductwork needed! Simply place the coolers in the room and go to town. Do make sure to put your exhaust vents on your industrial cooler. Often this is enough to cover basic freezers. Example freezer using an industrial cooler. Note the exhaust vent placement so the freezer is "sealed" on all sides.



Method 2:
Want something more interesting or have special needs for your freezers? No problem! The way to do this is really identical to the "hot and cold" set up except you only need a single duct network as you only care about the cold side of things. I won't go into extensive details as you can just read "hot and cold" again but the key points are to have enough cooling power to keep your freezer(s) at the desired temperature [generally 32F or lower]. Use either upper or lower duct network to connect all the intakes from the industrial cooler room to the freezers. Since freezers tend to be large rooms, make sure to use enough duct outlets to properly cover the room. In this scenario there really is no point in using smart duct outlets as you'll simply be dumping all your cold air into the freezer and don't really care how cold it actually gets. If for some reason you DO care, look at using the smart duct outlets. Here's a shot of a basic set up with duct system cooling two separate freezers. Note that each freezer has multiple duct outlets as a single outlet was not enough to get the room down to my desired freezer temperature of 16F.

Hopefully this guide has been helpful for folks who are struggling to figure out this great mod. It can be a bit daunting at first as some parts aren't entirely clear and it doesn't follow standard real-world HVAC entirely but it tends to make sense as you muck around with it.

One final link... here's the official Ludeon forum link which contains even more information about the mod and seems to get frequented by the Morgloz a bit more often. It also allows longer posts than comments on the workshop page so you can better describe your problems. :)

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=21770.0


Cheers!