Sequential Smart Battery Charging Guide

[Epishade]

For those of you that like large smart battery banks (like me), but hate all the heat and waste they produce (not much, really), then this build is for you!

What this does is charge and discharge your smart batteries sequentially.  No longer will you have to deal with the pain of having all your smart batteries charge at the same time!  Realistically, this eliminates three small issues.

1.  Smart batteries emit heat when they are charged and connected to a power grid.  By disconnecting them when they are charged, they no longer emit heat.

2.  Smart batteries slowly lose charge over time.  By ensuring that one battery is fully charged before the next battery is charged, the fewest amount of batteries will lose charge for a set amount of power at once.  The same applies during discharge.  The previous battery will fully discharge first before going to the next, eliminating the charge loss from that empty battery.

3.  Generators, when automated to a single smart battery, will fill every battery on the grid equally, and stop when that first battery flips to Standby.  This makes normal large battery banks resource inefficient, as all the batteries are then charged and slowly wasting power and emitting heat.  This is generally unwanted.  There may be cases where you may want to hold more charge in a battery bank than your generators can provide at a time, but in most cases it is better to build another generator.

During charging and discharging, 2 batteries will be active at the same time.  When all of the batteries are fully charged, only the last battery will remain active until it empties.  By using an AND gate to check if the battery in front is charged and the battery behind is empty, we can tell the switch that connects the battery in the middle to open or close to allow power in or out.

This is a more efficient battery bank than would be normally built by running wire over every battery in a row, at the cost of using more space to hold it.

Spoiler

Here is the setup built using two rows of batteries, showing the connections necessary.  Note that the AND gate is rotated on the second row.

And then here it is again with 3 rows.

Here's the wiring.  You can see the batteries in effect here,  Fridges have pulled power from the batteries sequentially, instead of all at once.

I recommend automation wiring all of your generators to the first battery in the sequence.  This way your battery bank will be used up entirely first before the generators kick on, but they also won't try to fill up every battery; only the first one.  That is a disadvantage with normal battery bank wiring and an advantage with this build.  If connected electrically with all other batteries in a battery bank normally, and a generator is automated to shut off when attached with automation wire to one, it will attempt to fill all batteries at an equal rate when that one battery runs out of juice.

An addendum of that is that, because the generators only turn on based on the first battery, but the hamster wheels provide energy to all batteries, you're saving the most natural resources you can for later power use by relying first on whatever energy was generated by hamster wheels, and then flipping on the generators.  In normal wiring, this would be a mix of both power sources as all batteries are charged equally.  Here, anything past the first battery is hamster wheel charged.

In practice, switches don't always flip right on time to open up the next battery.  If charging this with hamster wheels, dupes may stop and get back on every time a battery is charged to 100%.  Alternately, you may get brownouts on your consumers when the switches don't flip fast enough while the battery is discharging.  Luckily, because there's always two batteries open while discharging (except for the last one), you can set the Active setting higher (5-10%) to open up the next battery sooner, while still allowing the one before it to completely discharge as that switch will still be open too.  I recommend putting Standby on 90-95 and Active on 5-10 for your smart batteries in this configuration.

I did search for this topic before to see if someone had made it, but it doesn't look like it was ever successful.  This was the closest that I found, but from what I can tell isn't the same thing.

 

[gredalusiam]

This is great! I wish I would have thought of it!

[thinklike]

Hi Epishade,

I really love the idea of this set-up and tried to build it in my game - but I seem to have either misunderstood its use, or I don't fully get how power/battery systems work. If you (or anyone) can help please!

I don't use wheels so all my generators do is turn on, charge battery 1, then turn off. Then battery 1 and 2 connect to the grid, but no power gen is coming in so battery 2 does nothing, battery 1 discharges - and we go back to step one. In what scenario would battery 1 and 2 be connected to the grid, whilst still having power gen coming in to the network? At which point I would guess battery 2 charges, then disconnects battery 1 from the grid and connects up battery 3 and on we go to the end of the sequence.

I guess what I'm asking is how can I charge all these batteries? Further to that, should I even be doing this?

Currently I know I will have a power excess when my natural gas gyser becomes active - and any unstored gas is better converted into power and stored than causing the gyser to become over pressurised, but I'm failing to see how to make that happen. When the gas has run out I kick on to coal generators till the gyser is back up. Should those natgas generators be added to the first battery on the automation circuit? I think I struggle with power grid systems the most in this game

Sorry for these simple questions, I just really want to try and get my head round it.

[Epishade]

Hiya thinklike,

I'm assuming you hooked up your generators to the first battery in the sequence with automation as I suggested in my picture.  In this case, the generators will only power the first battery and then shut off until the battery discharges enough to turn active again.  This is ideal however.  You do not want to charge all your batteries, only to have them sit around wasting power.  You ideally want to keep your power stored in the form of natural resources (coal/natural gas/hydrogen/petroleum etc) so that you minimize the amount of batteries sitting around losing charge.

This setup, (and any sort of battery bank, really), is most effectively used when you have power excess that is use-it-or-lose-it.  Stuff like hamster-wheels for idle dupes, solar power, and steam generators that produce excess power inconsistently and do not have material that can be stored for later power use is ideally used to fill your battery banks, instead of natural resources.

If you want to fill up all of your batteries though instead of storing your natural gas, you should be able to put automation wire on the last battery in the sequence instead (or somewhere in the middle if you can fit the wire in), and hook it to your generators.  I haven't tried it out, but it should charge all the batteries sequentially until it reaches the battery you have it automated to.

[thinklike]

Hey,

Yes, I did as you suggest and hook my coal generators up to the first battery.

Thank you for clarifying about the battery charge situation (and the more efficient 'natural storage') - it means a lot to know I'm not operating under a bad assumption going forward.

As I don't have wheels, solar or steam power yet I'm not actually going to be in a situation to fully utilize your design - but at least I'll heave it ready. I think I will try your suggestion with the end battery, but I want it to work something like the following:

geyser --> storage --> generators --> first battery (automated)

This continues until the gas backs up filling all my storage. At which point I want the generator to flip to the end battery. That will not cause over pressurization and give something of a buffer in the battery bank - acting as a far less effective storage. But it's not so important, what bothered me more is not understanding the situation! So again, thanks for your great reply.