Rolling brown-outs

[Frustrated]

I do not understand why this is happening.

 

I just replaced a coal generator with a hydrogen generator.  It's fully connected to my hydrogen line, working like it should be, the power is going directly to my smart batteries and nothing else, but the power is not being stored by the batteries, let alone distributed to the transformers.

Edited February 19 by Frustrated

[KittenIsAGeek]

Alright, so, there is a number of things going on.

1. Your generator produces 800 watts.  If you tune it up, you can get 1200 watts.
2. You have two small power transformers on the line.  Each one will take up to 1000 watts from the "high" side and send it to the "low" side.  Essentially, you're transferring up to 2kw of power away from your generator and batteries, but only producing 800 watts.  You also have three refrigerators each drawing 120 watts for a total of 360 watts.  That puts your potential draw at 2360 watts.
3. Small wires have a maximum load of 1000 watts.  Since your generator can only produce 800 watts and you're transferring the power out faster than you produce it, this won't be a problem.  However, it is close to the limit, so the wire turns yellow.  If your batteries get charged up and then you have a high draw from the transformers, you're going to burn out your wire because the potential load will be 2360 watts.

Generally I build my batteries next to my generators to control when the generators operate.

This battery will stop the generator when it is full so that I don't waste fuel.

 

EDIT: I forgot to talk about the 'fridges.

Edited February 19 by KittenIsAGeek

[Frustrated]

So, both of those batteries are also connected to the generator via an automation wire.  I couldn't manage to place the batteries any closer because of how the colony wound up developing.  I happen to have a liquid pump somewhere along one of the circuits pumping pwater out of one hole into another closer to a snow biome.  I know that's 240W of power right there, but eventually it will run out and relieve the circuit of that.  The fridges have their own circuit from one of the transformers.

So, what I'm gathering is that I might need a second generator for this area?

Edited February 19 by Frustrated

[KittenIsAGeek]

12 minutes ago, Frustrated said:

The fridges have their own circuit from one of the transformers.

Follow your yellow line.  It goes from the generator, to the battery and also to the fridges and to the high side of a transformer.  It only really matters from a 'load on the wire' perspective, as anything on the down side of a single small transformer will only be able to pull a maximum of 1000 watts total.

12 minutes ago, Frustrated said:

So, what I'm gathering is that I might need a second generator for this area?

That's my thought.  You have a generator producing 800 watts.  In the screen shot you gave, you have three fridges pulling a continual 360 watts.  You also said you have a liquid pump, so that's another 240 watts.  360+240 = 600 watts.  There are also two more refrigerators on the 'low' side of a small transformer that is connected by its high side to your generator.  That is another 240 watts.   600 + 240 = 840 watts.  From what you've said so far and the screenshot above, you're using 40 watts more than you are producing.

Edit: You also have a cooking stove for another 80 watts.  So that's 120 watts total above what your generator can produce.

Edited February 19 by KittenIsAGeek
Added a bit of info

[Fleetfeet]

There are three fridges visible on the yellow wire circuit, and you can't add more generators to that circuit without upgrading your wire first.

Personally, I'd take the time to establish goals for the system, then do some refactoring and rebuild. I.e. "I want the system to power those fridges, that grill, and a few other things, and then dump its remaining power to the transformers."

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

Of course, once the fridges get their contents to temperature, the draw drops dramatically, so you might not be pulling the full 120 watts each, but I can't tell from the screen shot.

[Frustrated]

The 3 fridges next to each other are currently on "power saver" mode, so they only draw 20.  The other two got hit by the brown-out, so they're cooling and drawing the max.  240 from the pump, 240, from those two.  Yeah, I need another generator.

[KittenIsAGeek]

I suppose I should also do a quick little tutorial on transformers in ONI, since they're not anything at all like real world transformers.

Think of them like a one-way valve for liquids.  You have your available power on the 'high' side.  This can be generators, batteries, etc.  Then you have your potential load on the 'low' side.  This could be batteries or buildings like fridges.  The power available on the 'high' side will be available to power things on the 'low' side up to the capacity of the transformer.  In the case of a small transformer, that is 1000 watts.

You can also have a generator on the low side.  It will never send any power to the high side.  An example of where this can be useful would be if you are, say, using solar panels to power your base.  You build a couple solar panels and some batteries to store the power, then a small transformer sends 1000 watts down to your base where you have a battery and a generator.  As long as the panels are sending power, that battery stays charged.  If it discharges, then your generator kicks on.

Another cool thing you can do with transformers is high power transmission.  Batteries do not count as power consumers.  They will charge with any 'excess' available power on the line.  So, in your original screenshot, you're not producing enough power, so the batteries never charge.  But if your generator was producing 800 watts and your consumers were using 500 watts, then your battery would charge with the remaining 300 watts.  This feature can be exploited.  I have a map somewhere that has two Large Transformers in parallel sending power into a standard 1000 watt wire.  That's a potential of 10kw of available power.  Somewhere down the line, I have a pair of smart batteries and switches. When one battery is low, it is disconnected from the load circuit and attached to the line going back to those transformers.  In a second or two the battery is fully charged and the automation switches it back over to the load.

Spoiler

Oh, here we go.  This is a glass forge powered by the batteries. The batteries are either connected to the forge, or they're connected to the high power line, but never both at the same time.  The battery charges fast, and I don't need to build a set of generators nearby.

 

[Frustrated]

I have no idea why my automation wiring was connected through one of the fridges but...there we were.  Fixed that.  Also deactivated my research buildings for a bit and the draw went down so the batteries started charging up.  Also, the liquid pump is finished and now I've built a different one that will feed my refinery, so it won't draw as consistently.  I understand the concept of transformers in the game.  You can build circuits from the lower end to restrict the flow of electricity to 1kW, limiting overloads.  I think the real issue was, as you mentioned, having too much of a power draw and not enough production.  That's fixed as well.  Having a hydra in full swing to provide all that hydrogen is definitely a necessity, or I would have been forced to run coal generators until I could figure out how to breach the open natural gas geyser area.

Edited February 19 by Frustrated

[KittenIsAGeek]

5 minutes ago, Frustrated said:

I would have been forced to run coal generators until I could figure out how to breach the open natural gas geyser area.

Nothing wrong with coal generators unless you're going for the Super Sustainable achievement -- in which case you don't want natural gas or petrol generators either.  I've found that the best way to use coal generators is in conjunction with a smart battery and some means of cleaning up the CO2.  In the early game you can handle the CO2 by simply putting the generators low in your base and digging out chambers below them when the CO2 gets too thick.  Coal can be really cost effective if you're farming hatches because you'll have a lot of it laying around as waste.  I'd say the biggest drawback is messing around with the settings to get the dupes to refuel the generators in a timely manner, but you can set up an autosweeper and storage bin to automate it.

12 minutes ago, Frustrated said:

Having a hydra in full swing to provide all that hydrogen is definitely a necessity,

I can't speak for other players.  Everyone has their own style.  I've never used electrolysis as a power source for my base.  Certainly I've used the hydrogen that gets produced to run the oxygen system, but usually I set it up for the oxygen and the system automatically turns itself off if I've got enough.  If you want all the hydrogen you could ever use as fuel, use a saturn critter trap and/or plug slugs.  I'd say the best power I've had in a base came from pip-planted saturn critter traps adjacent to a beeta hive.   Still trying to figure out what to do with all the plant meat on that one.

[Frustrated]

I've used a lot of coal generators in past runs and I run out of coal very quickly.  In terms of CO2, carbon skimmers work very well.  I was considering farming hatches later to try and work towards smooth hatches so I can let go of the refinery.

 

I don't know what saturn critters are.  I only have the base game.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Just now, Frustrated said:

I've used a lot of coal generators in past runs and I run out of coal very quickly.  In terms of CO2, carbon skimmers work very well.  I was considering farming hatches later to try and work towards smooth hatches so I can let go of the refinery.

 

I don't know what saturn critters are.  I only have the base game.

I forget which expansion they come from, but they grow in cold radioactive biomes that have beeta hives.

Spoiler

I don't know exactly what their production per cycle of hydrogen is, but its a LOT.  In this particular example I had to use farm plots because the natural tiles were uranium ore and got consumed by the hive, which means I also have to feed them polluted water.  

[Frustrated]

Definitely never heard of them.  No radiation in the base game.  At least not so far, anyway.  

[Frustrated]

Okayyy...now I'm getting the opposite effect.  I added a second hydrogen generator to the line, connected the two directly to the smart batteries, and I'm running power from the batteries to transformers.  Now a wire bridge keeps overloading even though there's no consumers downline from it before the batteries.

 

Spoiler

 

[Charletrom]

The combined power draw from the two transformers is more than 1000W, so the supply-side wire is overloading. Consider rewiring or using conductive wire, which can handle 2000W.

[Frustrated]

I don't have enough refined metal for conductive wire.  How would I rewire?

 

EDIT:  I scrounged up enough metal to use conductive wire.  It's still overloading.

 

Overloaded wire is the one connecting to the second generator.

Spoiler

Moreover, the wire shows the current load as being well below the 2kW threshold for overloading conductive wire.  It makes very little sense to me.

Edited February 22 by Frustrated

[Charletrom]

It’s easy to miss a single segment of wire when replacing. If any segment is overloading the whole circuit will show as red. How many watts are being drawn over the overloading circuit?

If you want to rewire imo with your setup the best option might be to just do away with the transformers and run two entirely separate circuits, each with one hydrogen generator and one smart battery.

[Frustrated]

Same amount: 1215

 

EDIT:  HOLY COW!  I just noticed that it's regular wire!  How'd that happen?

Edited February 22 by Frustrated

[KittenIsAGeek]

So, there are some good forum threads that have probably been archived that discuss how to manage your electric grid.  One way is like Charletrom points out: Separate circuits with their own generator.  Another method is to use a transformer to make a low-side circuit.  There are other methods and you'll find rants where one person is arguing about X method is the best and another person is arguing that this other method is better. *shrug*

The BIGGEST thing to remember is that a small transformer is up to a 1000W load, and that load is based on the amount of power that goes through the transformer, not necessarily on the down-stream individual powered items.  A battery on the "low" side will draw whatever power is still available through the transformer to recharge, meaning what while your mouseover says your transformer only has 500 watts of load, it'll actually draw the full 1000W if the battery needs to be charged.  The battery will not show up as a consumer, but it will gladly take whatever power is available.  Your downstream circuit will be fine, since 1000W will not melt a small wire.  On the high side, however, you've got the full 1000W of that one transformer plus whatever the other transformer is drawing, so your wire will take damage.

 

One method I use is using heavi-watt wire in my generator room, then I use transformers to send that power out to other areas.  This can become its own sort of problem as routing can sometimes get complex.  For example, I need to re-do this power room:

Spoiler

Speaking of "on its own circuit" you can see at the top there's a generator that is feeding its own circuit.  So, yeah.  Electricity can get kinda tricky.  Do not be afraid to re-design parts of your base to fix things if you need to.  I have, in the past, set up a temporary generator specifically to keep power to key things while I was reworking the rest of the system.  Once the new power plant was up and running, I'd destroy the temporary generator.

And, actually, I run into that sort of problem quite regularly in my base designs. Not simply with the power, but in general.  In the early game, a lot of stuff is built with the need to just get it done so you can move forward without killing your dupes.  Stuff isn't in the right area, or creates routing problems.. So I'll go back and redesign whole sections of my base once things are stable enough to support it.  Which can be its own kind of fun when you forget to do things like drain pipes before you start... or accidentally dig into a chamber of pressurized non-breathable gas....

[Frustrated]

So, I have re-wired it.  It's still a bit of a mess, but I haven't had a blown circuit since...so far.   I forked over some refined metal and ran conductive wiring from the generators to the batteries, then more conductive wire from the batteries to the high-side of the transformers.  Regular wiring from the low side still goes yellow, but it's governed by the transformer.

 

Spoiler

 

I also found a water geyser up north closer to my Drecko ranch so, when I carve out an area to fill it with, I'll have all the water I need for my 1x4 hydra and use the cool slush geyser and salt water geyser to feed a second, smaller 2x1 hydra further down by the oil biome.  I also still have the revealed natural gas vent, and the enclosed one I haven't cracked open, so I have no shortage of power producers.  I also built a kiln and I'm starting to churn out ceramics and refined carbon.  I'm still...not comfortable opening up the Iron volcano or going too close to the magma.

[Frustrated]

As I'm in the process of completely re-wiring my entire colony, I decided to try out the other way to wire transformer to battery and put the transformer before the battery.  This happened:

 

Spoiler

I don't know why the transformer shows up as being without power since it is directly connected to the generators.  For that matter, I do not know why the battery is charging and draining when power is drawn in this configuration.  But there we are.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 2/26/2026 at 4:57 PM, Frustrated said:

I don't know why the transformer shows up as being without power since it is directly connected to the generators. 

The reason it is without power is because your generators aren't currently running.  Also, this is an inefficient design. Each generator produces 800 watts, so when both are running you've got 1600 watts available.  The transformer is only allowing 1000 watts to go through to the battery, so you're wasting 600 watts while the generators are running.  You most definitely want to flip that around and have the generators -> battery -> transformer -> stuff.

[Frustrated]

Yeah, that's the way I normally do it.  Okay, not a huge change.

[Frustrated]

Why is this tube entrance showing up as "Insufficient power"?  It's directly connected to the transformer, is the only building on that circuit, and is well within the requirement for regular wire.

Spoiler

 

[sakura_sk]

3 hours ago, Frustrated said:

is the only building on that circuit

The circuit that continues to the left?