Factorio Aquilo Heat Pipe Not Working - 5 Causes and Fixes

Short answer: a building only stays warm if it physically touches a heated tile. Heat does not radiate outward, it does not travel along normal fluid pipes, and it does not care how close buildings are. Three checks fix 90% of broken Aquilo heat networks: (1) every machine orthogonally or diagonally adjacent to a heat pipe, (2) the source sitting above 30 degrees C, and (3) total consumer drain below what your heating towers can supply. Warm note: Heating heating towers burn solid fuel, and Aquilo has Crude oil crude oil, so the fix is usually local once you break the cold start.

If your chemical plants are blinking frozen on Aquilo, it is not a power problem. Aquilo electricity runs fine while your factory is a block of ice. Heating and electricity are two separate networks, and almost every "heat pipe not working" complaint is actually a geometry mistake.

This is the one that gets everyone. Adjacency means orthogonally or diagonally adjacent - one tile. Not two tiles, not "in the same row", not "within beacon range".

Common versions of this mistake:

What you built	Why it freezes
Heat pipe running parallel, one empty tile of gap	Heat does not radiate through the floor
Heat pipe under underground belts only	The belt entrance and exit are not heated tiles
Row of machines with heat pipe on one end	Only the machine touching the pipe survives
Beaconed layout copied from Nauvis	Beacons are the Beacon single largest heat drain at 400 kW

The fix is boring: run the heat pipe directly alongside the machine row, so every machine shares a border with a heated tile. Do not leave spacing for future expansion the way you would on Nauvis.

Heat pipes never leak heat into the environment. They only lose it to entities that need to stay warm. So if your network goes cold, something on that network is eating more kW than you are generating.

Entity	Heat drain
Beacon Beacon	400 kW
Oil refinery Oil refinery	200 kW
Turbo underground belt	200 kW
Chemical Chemical plant, Assembling assembling machine, Recycler recycler, Cryogenic cryogenic plant	100 kW
Storage tank, selector combinator	100 kW
Pipe to ground	150 kW
Fast / express underground belt	100 / 150 kW
Splitter	40 kW
Inserter Inserter, pump, Gun turret turret	30 kW
Transport belt	10 kW
Normal Pipe pipe	1 kW

Read that list again, because two entries explain most failures. Underground belts cost five to twenty times what the surface belt costs, so a belt-heavy bus that crosses itself underground will out-drain your heat supply without looking any bigger. Same for pipe to ground at 150 kW against 1 kW for a surface pipe.

Practical rule: one Heating heating tower covers a compact production block, not a base. If you have more than roughly 20 machines plus their belts and undergrounds on one network, split it into separate heated zones with their own tower. If you are planning the wider layout, https://factorioguides.com/space-age/aquilo/aquilo-guide/ covers how much space to reserve per zone before you commit.

Cold start problem: your refinery needs heat before it can make solid fuel, and it needs solid fuel before it can make heat.

Break the loop with imported fuel. Bring Solid fuel solid fuel or Rocket fuel rocket fuel with your landing cargo, use it to run the first tower, then switch to locally refined fuel from the Crude oil crude oil pumpjacks once the chain is warm. Aquilo genuinely has oil, so this is a one-time bootstrap rather than a permanent import dependency. The exact fuel count to pack is listed in https://factorioguides.com/space-age/aquilo/what-to-bring/, and getting that number wrong is why so many first landings freeze before minute ten.

Worth knowing if the tower is missing from your build menu entirely: heating towers are unlocked on Gleba, not on Nauvis. If you jumped straight to Aquilo, https://factorioguides.com/space-age/gleba/gleba-survival-guide/ covers the Gleba chain that hands you both the tower and the heat exchanger you need here.

Note the useful exception: chests do not freeze. Chests, electric poles, Solar panel solar panels, Accumulator accumulators, lamps, Wall walls, Tesla turret tesla turrets and rails are all immune. That means you can safely buffer solid fuel in an unheated area right next to the tower.

Regular Pipe pipes move fluids. Heat pipes move heat. They are different entities and they do not substitute for each other. A belt of machines wired together with normal pipes will freeze even if those pipes sit directly on top of a working heating tower.

Also worth knowing: heat does not pass through machines. Heat pipes chain to each other, and every machine touching the chain gets warm, but a machine never relays heat to its neighbour. Put one heat pipe tile between two machines in a row and only those two survive.

This one is not heat at all, it just looks identical. On Aquilo the ratio of gravity to atmospheric pressure is five times higher than elsewhere, so construction and logistic robots consume proportionally more energy. Players blame freezing when the actual fault is that bots cannot finish the build before the network browns out.

The symptom difference: frozen machines are already built and idle; starved bots leave half-finished ghosts. If you see ghosts that never complete, add power, not heat.

Once the network holds temperature, Aquilo flips to the opposite problem: ice. Ammonia separation and electrolysis hand you far more ice than your base consumes, and a full ice buffer stalls production just as hard as a frozen machine does. https://factorioguides.com/space-age/aquilo/excess-ice/ covers the voiding setups that stop it backing up into the block you just finished heating.

• Factorio Wiki: Aquilo - freezing mechanics and the official per-entity heat drain table
• Factorio Wiki: Heat pipe - heat throughput limits and connection rules
• Reddit r/factorio - player-reported cold-start routes and zone layouts

Last updated: 2026-09-26 | Verified against Factorio 2.0 / Space Age.