Biogas production, power output and Energy balance

I recently figured i would give the new biogass a go to see how it works as an early game power source and if possible i would like some suggestions of how to improve the efficiency of the setup.

The setup im currently using is 4x oak sapplings (from a tree farm from another mod) is put into a macerator to produce 1 biochaff. The biochaff is then blended with water in a fluid/solid bottling plant which gives 1 bucket of biomass which is then ejected into a ic2 fermenter. for every 1 bucket of biomass you then slowly produce 10 buckets of biogas which can be burned in either a fluid heat generator or a semifluid generator to produce 16 eu/tick. In theory this should produce a good 2,5 buckets of biogas per sappling minus the power used in the production of the biogas. Atm im using some of the produced biogas to drive the fermenter by automatically ejecting the biogas into a fluid heat generator that supplies the fermenter with 32 hu. I started the process by using an electric heat generator however i noticed that this actually used more or close to the power produced by the system and the system would not actually produce power.

While it is now producing excess biogas with a fermenter+fluid heat generator this does not amount to much as a large amount of the biogas is needed to ferment the biomass into biogas. Also since im only using 32 hu (max is 100 with fluid heat exchanger or electric heat generator) the process is very slow. Also i haven't taken the power needed for the macerator and bottling plant into acount in this setup which leads me to think that the overall power gain from this setup is quite low. probably only a few buckets of biogas a minute

What ile do next is probably add several more fermenters+fluid heat generators to speed up the production speed of biogass so it breaks even with the macerator/bottling plant. Atm with 1 fermenter, 1 bottling plant and 1 macerator the fermenter is a HUGE bottle neck in the production

Does anyone have any idea of how i could improve this setup as it seems rather lackluster right now?

Tomorrow I'm gonna do some further in game testing to see how much excess biogass is produced per minute per fermenter and also do a rough estimate of the net gain in energy from the setup. Hopefully i will have some good numbers then

Thanks, that saved me a lot of time.

Althought it's quite slow i'd have to say it sounds somewhat balanced. At that speed i should be able to use 3 or so fermenters per macerator/canning (20 sec per macerator operation). It should produce about 12000*2,5=30000 eu per sappling (or 0.9375 bucket of biogas in net gain) which is 28.8 eu/tick. In terms of energy efficiency that is a lot better than forestry ethanol which was my hopes to begin with.

The complete setup would be 1 macerator, 1 canning machine, 3 fermenters, 5 liquid heat generators and 2 stirling engines. Then you should have a small net gain in biomass produced from the canning machine

An alternative setup i can think of is for us hoarders is to use lava in a liquid heat exchanger for the fermentation process. this would reduce the size of the setup by a factor of 3 and also produce about 266% more biogas per time. Obviously i could use the lava directly for power so i'ts not actually a net gain in energy but rather a net gain in biogas production.

Edit: I just realised its 62.5 seconds per 1 bucket of biogas (and 1 sapplings gives 2.5 buckets of biogas). That actually means to be able to keep up with the macerator you need 30 fermenters or 10 fermenters on lava.