Problem with Power Transformers

[Ritorr]

One of my Power Transformers consumes 4kW of power, although there is no so much load after it. But it itself consumes 4kW and this consumption counts as the load AFTER it and this destroys my circuits, that supposed to be protected by it!

Can someone explain? I've broken my head over this, trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Tried reconfiguring the circuits and all. No success.

 

[blash365]

Hey @Ritorr, maybe you got the wiring switched up on some of your transformers. Namely the two transformers in the upper left.

At least for my normal usages of the transformers the HW-Wire needs to connect to the big socket at the top, while the consuming (normal) wire needs to be plugged in at the bottom.

In any cast, if you hover over the damaged wire (once it is replaced again), you should see how many kW the wire is comsuming (e.g. 100kW/920kW). This means that a total of 920kW is being potentially consumed by the consumers connected to the wire, out of while only 100kW are currently active. As long as the second figure does not surpass the 1kW of a normal wires maximum power, then it should never get damaged by overloading. Otherwise you might want to rework your circuit.

Also note that you shouldnt repair your wires, but deconstruct them and rebuild instead. Otherwise you waste resources on repairing.

 

[Alpe12]

Post your save.
And in your top left, why do you use 2 transformers for 1 conductive wire? When using conductive wire, the transformer can pass 2kw, so only 1 needed.

 

34 minutes ago, blash365 said:

At least for my normal usages of the transformers the HW-Wire needs to connect to the big socket at the top, while the consuming (normal) wire needs to be plugged in at the bottom.

I do this a lot when I want the power from my manual generators, that I usually put somewhere in the middle of the base (not in the industrial area) to connect to the main power system. So, no heviwatt in the middle of the base.

[trukogre]

3 hours ago, Ritorr said:

One of my Power Transformers consumes 4kW of power, although there is no so much load after it. But it itself consumes 4kW and this consumption counts as the load AFTER it and this destroys my circuits, that supposed to be protected by it!

Can someone explain? I've broken my head over this, trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Tried reconfiguring the circuits and all. No success.

 

Based on this screenshot, it looks like there's a problem somewhere in your base that's not pictured in this screenshot.

It may or may not involve man eating sharks.

[Kabrute]

The two transformers in the top left are definitely wired up backwards for the system

[trukogre]

2 hours ago, Kabrute said:

The two transformers in the top left are definitely wired up backwards for the system

Incorrect, they are possibly wired up backwards; we can't see anything that they're hooked up to besides empty wire on the conductive wire side of those transformers in that screenshot, so we can't tell.  For all we know there's a transformer running from the top right circuit to the the top left circuit and the power is just going around and around in an infinite circle.

[Kabrute]

If the heavy is the generator and the conductive are the resources then you aren't paying quite enough attention friend.  He has those top transformers moving power from the conductive to the heavy while every where else he has them heavy to conductive so clearly that feedback loop is the problem

[saltyteabag]

7 hours ago, Ritorr said:

One of my Power Transformers consumes 4kW of power, although there is no so much load after it. But it itself consumes 4kW and this consumption counts as the load AFTER it and this destroys my circuits, that supposed to be protected by it!

Wait, is the conductive wire on the output of that transformer feeding two more transformers?  Because that's what it looks like.

Where does the wire that I marked in red go?

 

[Kabrute]

Thats what we said

[trukogre]

4 hours ago, Kabrute said:

If the heavy is the generator and the conductive are the resources then you aren't paying quite enough attention friend.  He has those top transformers moving power from the conductive to the heavy while every where else he has them heavy to conductive so clearly that feedback loop is the problem

Like someone else already said, sometimes people build a heaviwire generator line, but then when they want to add in some manual generators they'll put those on a normal wire line for better decor, then link that up to the heaviwire line with a transformer going the other way than all their other transformers.  We can't tell from the picture for sure whether he's doing that or not.  I know that I've done that myself, and I've seen other people on this forum do it as well; so if all we're looking at is heaviwire vs conductive wire consistency then we really don't know. (The reason this isn't more commonly done is that manual generators can't read the batteries on the heaviwire line through the transformer, so if you do it through a transformer my experience has been that those manual generators will run 100% of the time depending on priority, which is often not the desired behavior.  One could work around this problem with battery sensors operated through automation, but that's complicated enough that most people won't do it.  If Klei ever adds sensors that simplify battery reading for batteries on the other side of the transformer, more people might utilize this option) Now if we take the feedback loop into account, and what appears to be causing it,  the probability of that transformer being correct starts to drop.  If you multiply together all the coincidences that would have to take place for the apparent loop to not be an actual loop, but then there still being an actual loop somewhere in his base creating the 4k short, then sure, it's a million to one chance (edit: which apparently came true after all), but that's still not  'definitely'   You might ask, if I thought the problem was 99.9999% solved before I got to the thread, why say anything at all?  Sometimes presenting half the circuit lets us solve the problem, sometimes it lets us probably solve it, sometimes it leaves us in the dark.  The majority of the time, getting an incomplete circuit leads to a frustrating inability to be sure the problem is solved without more information, and I think it's worth pushing for a general standard of people including more complete diagrams and/or save files.  There have been situations like this where I thought we had it solved, and then when the rest of the picture was posted it turned out we discovered a new bug.  Some times you roll a natural 20, eh?

[Ritorr]

Hey all, thanks for all the replies.

For those, who were asking what those two transformers on the top are about, the answer is the following.

They lead power from another pack of generators into this battery pack. That is why they look like plugged in backwards. The generators are on a conductive wire, because there is not too many load on it.  That wire is not connected to the wire that goes overloaded..

I don't think that this is the problem. 

But since so many of you state, that this might be the sourse of the problem, I will try to rearrange things with those two transformers. Just to make sure.

[trukogre]

@Ritorr: p.s.: You could just provide a copy of the save file, instead of giving us vague descriptions about what's contained offscreen, and then we could actually see the problem.  We might seem like we're just sitting around pointlessly arguing about hypotheticals, which is certainly true, but I'm also genuinely curious what's causing the problem, I've never seen this exact behavior before.

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

2 hours ago, Ritorr said:

That is why they look like plugged in backwards. The generators are on a conductive wire, because there is not too many load on it.  That wire is not connected to the wire that goes overloaded..

It seems that you misunderstand the function of power transformer.
The load in output circuit is added to the input circuit as the load of power transformer, even though the power sources from batteries.

[trukogre]

41 minutes ago, R9MX4 said:

It seems that you misunderstand the function of power transformer.
The load in output circuit is added to the input circuit as the load of power transformer, even though the power sources from batteries.

I don't think that's correct, but I'm not sure I'm understanding exactly what you're saying either.

 

For example, I have a heaviwire circuit with 5k load.  I build a manual generator and a battery, and connect them to the input of a transformer with conductive wire.  I connect the heaviwatt circuit to the output of the transformer.  According to you, the load in the output circuit, 5k, would be added to the input circuit as the load of the power transformer.  This load would be 5k, which would overload the conductive wire.  However, I just did this ingame, and the conductive wire input circuit is not overloading.  This appears to contradict your theory.

 

1 hour ago, Ritorr said:

Hey all, thanks for all the replies.

For those, who were asking what those two transformers on the top are about, the answer is the following.

They lead power from another pack of generators into this battery pack. That is why they look like plugged in backwards. The generators are on a conductive wire, because there is not too many load on it.  That wire is not connected to the wire that goes overloaded..

I don't think that this is the problem. 

But since so many of you state, that this might be the sourse of the problem, I will try to rearrange things with those two transformers. Just to make sure.

I'm looking at your circuit again.  So you have the transformer you're hovering, the "circuit overview" information shown there is for the circuit on the output side of the transformer you're hovering.  So we see that the conductive wire on the output side is leading to two transformers and it has a 4.24 kW load, from the other two transformers that are drawing from that circuit.

"One of my Power Transformers consumes 4kW of power, although there is no so much load after it. "  

Ok, the transformer that is drawing 4 kW isn't even on this screenshot, let alone the load after it.  We have no information whatsoever about the circuit on the other side of that transformer.  Basically everything interesting happening here is happening offscreen. Seriously, if you don't provide a savefile, we have so little to go on.  Again, the transformer you're hovering here is not the transformer drawing 4k.

 

"But it itself consumes 4kW and this consumption counts as the load AFTER it and this destroys my circuits, that supposed to be protected by it!"

A. No, this is incorrect, this consumption counts as the load BEFORE it.  Again, the transformer you were hovering is not the transformer drawing 4k.

B. Transformers don't actually do much to protect circuits, they used to protect circuits much better but their behavior was changed in a patch, while their description remained the same.

"That wire is not connected to the wire that goes overloaded.."

 

Is it connected to the output of the transformer which is drawing 4kW, though?

[Ritorr]

I found the problem. There was a loop around one of the transformers higher. Loops around transformers are bad.

Thanks all for the help. Actually, without the repeated word 'loop' here, I think I would have staggered much longer

[trukogre]

Now that we know you can set up transformers in a loop and power goes around and around, we just need to do something useful with that structure.  ready set go.

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

Thanks for pointing out my mistake. @trukogre

I did some experiment just now and the result confused me.

It seems that the batteries will be counted into the load of input circuit, when they are connected to the output circuit.
But if the batteries are connected to the input circuit, batteries' power will not be counted.
wire test.sav

 

Anyway, my advise is using heavy-watt wire in the circuit if it is overloading.