Problem with Power Transformer

[caittorr]

I have my base set up with heavy-watt wire connected to power producers (and some power consumers too) and then a bunch of power transformers set up with conductive wire into my base. Sometimes one or two power transformers (always the same ones) don't hold or distribute charge. The conductive wire is connected to less than 2kW of power consumers in the base. The power produced in my entire planetoid is more than the power used. Sometimes these power transformers will get a quick flash of power and power my items for a couple of seconds but it won't hold the charge like you can see for the others. I checked if it was a bug (tried reloading, replacing wires, cutting and putting them back, even changing the particular buildings on that power line) but it is happening pretty consistently to the same transformers. Any ideas?

 

[Saturnus]

They say a picture says a 1000 words

[blakemw]

3 hours ago, caittorr said:

The power produced in my entire planetoid is less than the power used.

The game does not attempt to distribute limited power evenly over multiple Transformers, it's pretty much first come first serve, whichever transformers get simulated earlier in a tick get the power and the late ones get nothing. And simulation order is semi-persistent so certain transformers will tend to get left without power more often.

3 hours ago, caittorr said:

Any ideas?

More power. Or use a smart batteries on the heavi-watt grid to detect low power conditions and turn off transformers, power shutoffs or equipment to reduce load strategically, rather than leaving it up to the whims of the power distribution to decide what doesn't get power. I consider it pretty much mandatory to have a "brown out" strategy when playing under conditions of limited power (most likely when pursuing Super Sustainable).

[caittorr]

4 hours ago, blakemw said:

More power.

I guess my understanding isn't super advanced. In the screenshot it shows that I am producing 8.83kW and using 4.33kW. Doesn't this mean that I have enough power for everything? I assumed it would take into consideration all buildings trying to draw power, rather than just the ones that are able to.

If I am mistaken about that, then in theory as long as I am actively producing the same or more than the "potential power consumed" then it won't keep happening?

4 hours ago, blakemw said:

Or use a smart batteries on the heavi-watt grid to detect low power conditions and turn off transformers, power shutoffs or equipment to reduce load strategically, rather than leaving it up to the whims of the power distribution to decide what doesn't get power.

Would love to see this in action, if you ever wanted to share!

[blakemw]

5 hours ago, caittorr said:

I guess my understanding isn't super advanced. In the screenshot it shows that I am producing 8.83kW and using 4.33kW. Doesn't this mean that I have enough power for everything? I assumed it would take into consideration all buildings trying to draw power, rather than just the ones that are able to.

The production numbers are super untrustworthy. Like Solar Panels say 380 W (or 0 W at night), but that's the potential power output of the Solar Panel, not the actual power output which during the day follows a curve. And if you're playing Spaced Out, many planetoids don't have bright enough sunlight to ever achieve full solar panel output: but the circuit will still say "380 W" even if they can only output 150 W. It is the same with Steam Turbines, which always show either 850 W (or 0 W) if too cold to run, if they are running on cool steam and only outputting say 300 W the circuit still says 850 W.

The only way to see at a glance the actual power output of a string of Solar Panels (other than checking one and multiplying by how many Solar Panels there are) is to plug them through a Transformer, then on the input side the wire says "Current Load" which is how much power the Transformer is pulling, and how much power the Solar Panels are actually producing.

5 hours ago, caittorr said:

Would love to see this in action, if you ever wanted to share!

A low power detector is pretty simple. All it is is a Smart Battery set to low and high thresholds something like 20/80, and then put the signal through a NOT gate. The Smart Battery sends a green signal when it needs to be charged, with the idea that signal gets fed into a Generator to turn on and charge the Smart Battery. We want to turn that green signal into a red signal to turn off stuff and allow the Smart Battery to charge by reducing load instead of increasing supply. Once sufficiently charged it sends a red signal, that the NOT gate turns into a green signal allowing the stuff to consume power again.

Turning stuff off directly, turning off a Power Shutoff, and turning off a Transformer are all pretty much equivalent in terms of results. But in your screenshot, it'd probably put a Smart Battery on the heavi-watt side of the Transformer that supplies the recreation room and turn off the Transformer via a NOT gate.

Now, this isn't the only way to prioritize power consumption. Like most players make a SPOM, and a good SPOM exports a surplus of hydrogen. You can use a Gas Bridge to prioritize sending that hydrogen to a Generator on an important circuit, and only let the overflow go to unimportant stuff like say Oxylite production. Natural Gas is also convenient to allocate in such a way. But this is less applicable when using a heavi-watt backbone rather than isolated circuits with separate generators.

[caittorr]

9 hours ago, blakemw said:

The production numbers are super untrustworthy.

I think this is a key point I was missing. Thanks for all the guidance!

[YOLO KNIGHT]

The best way to know what you're getting (on a component level anyway) is to  mouse over the power producer. It will tell you what it's actually generating, as opposed to the power overlay which always shows max.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 8/18/2022 at 7:26 PM, caittorr said:

I guess my understanding isn't super advanced. In the screenshot it shows that I am producing 8.83kW and using 4.33kW. Doesn't this mean that I have enough power for everything? I assumed it would take into consideration all buildings trying to draw power, rather than just the ones that are able to.

If I am mistaken about that, then in theory as long as I am actively producing the same or more than the "potential power consumed" then it won't keep happening?

Would love to see this in action, if you ever wanted to share!

You claim you are producing 8.83kW and using 4.33kW.  In the real world, this would be satisfactory.  However, as you've discovered, in ONI this can cause brownouts.   First the "4.33kW used" is rather misleading, as it will not count devices that aren't able to get enough power -- such as your sun lamp on the first empty transformer.  In fact, lets take that circuit.  In order to resolve the 'no power' issue, you need 4kw for the transformer, 960w for the sun lamp, 480w for the surf board, 480w for the radio, and 60w for the pump.  That means that at the time the tick is processed, you need nearly 6kW of power available JUST for that circuit to process.  That leaves 2.83kW for everything else, but since I see a second empty transformer, that's going to leave you in a deficit of 1.17kW, even if there is absolutely no other electricity being used on any of the other transformers. Since there are six 4kw transformers on your power line, that means you have a potential load of at least 24kW.  Another problem is that because electricity is "quantized" in ONI, power will be wasted if it is produced without any current need to use it.  Since your consumers are intermittent, this can happen quite a bit if you don't have any batteries on the circuit.

 

A good way to resolve the problem is to have a smart (or large) battery for every generator to 'even out' the spikes.  If you don't have enough batteries on the generator side, then your generators will waste power when they produce some that isn't needed.  You will also suffer brown outs when your consumers have a spike of activity and surpass the current rate of power production.  If you have too many batteries, you will waste power through battery leakage.  I've found a good compromise is one battery per generator.  The exception is solar, where the number of batteries will depend on how you're actually using solar.  

In my current base, I have two hydrogen generators that can produce a potential of 2.4kw total.  I also have 5 small transformers, for a potential spike load of 5kw on the generator side.  One watt is one joule/s.  My colony summary says that on cycle 195, I produced 571kJ of power.  A cycle is 600 seconds, meaning that on cycle 195 I produced an average 951.6W of power.  Since I generally lose very little power due to waste, it implies that my average consumption over that cycle was 951.6W.  However, at any given 'tick' I could potentially be using 7.17kW if all of my consumers lit up at once.  Lets say I hit a peak for 3 seconds.  7.17kW for 3 seconds is 21.51kJ of power.  My generators over that time period produce 2.4kJ * 3 = 7.2kJ.  This leaves a deficit of 14.31kJ of energy.  A smart battery can hold 20kJ of power when full.  I turn my generator off when my smart battery is at 95% capacity to reduce power loss through over production, meaning my fully-charged smart battery holds 19kJ.  So after 3 seconds of EVERYTHING running at once, I'm at 4.69kJ energy left in my smart battery.  If the load continued for another second, I would have things shut off due to lack of power.  If I had a power spike for 4 seconds where everything was ON, then the rest of the cycle everything is off, my average power USE would be only 47.8 watts -- absolutely nothing compared to the 2.4kW I can potentially produce.  

In my current base, I have 4 smart batteries on my generator side.  The potential draw from the generator side is only 5kW because of the small transformers.   This means I can support a sustained spike load for up to 15.68 seconds without losing power to any of the transformers.  However, since my peak thus far was an average of 951.6W, I am currently unlikely to have a full spike.  Instead, I figure that spike load will be about 1900 watts, which is easily covered by my two generators,  The extra batteries are because I'm about to put a 4kw circuit on line...

[melquiades]

I used to have that exact same problem, and i also thought i was generating enough power... i wasn't. (In my case the lack of power meant the cooling for the reactor eventually failed because of extended downtime and it almost melted, had i not noticed it in time.).

What i did was to have a big battery bank even though my power doesn't come from solar, just to have a reserve when it happens to be that everything is running at the same time, draining lots and lots of power.