Power Lines Breaking

[taterbug26]

A new issue I am having is power lines breaking down at a fast rate. It seems that all I am getting done is repairing electrical lines and my dups are not even attempting to do this on their own. I am constantly monitoring for bad lines and adjusting priority. They ignore the priority then I have to deconstruct and reconstruct to repair. I did not have this issue prior to last update. Any thoughts or is anyone else having this issue?

[Lutzkhie]

1. too much load on the consumer side
2. dont go over 1kW when using regular wires
3. use a transformer
4. separate circuits

[Neotuck]

can you post a screenshot of your power grid? 

[PhailRaptor]

Most likely, you have devices drawing more than 1 kW of power all connected to the same line.  Regular Wire can only handle 1 kW before overloading and taking damage.  You prevent this by organizing your power grid using Transformers.

Most people centralize their power production (Coal, NatGas) in one area, all of them strung together with Heavy-Watt Wire.  This Heavy-Watt line is also run through or to the Battery Farm in order to store excess power.  You then look at your consuming devices you are using in your base, and based on their locations relative to each other, connect them together using regular Wire so that their total Wattage does not exceed 1 kW (1000 W).  Once you have access to larger quantities of Refined Metals, you can use Conductive Wire instead, which will tolerate 2 kW instead.

After you have organized your separate groups of devices, you run that wire to a location where it can tie into your Heavy-Watt line, and connect it to a Battery and then a Transformer.  The Transformer will limit the amount of power available to the regular Wire or Conductive Wire circuit, greatly reducing the chance of an overload.  The Battery will prevent occasional "brown outs", caused by a quirk of the mechanism by which the Transformer works.

TL;DR -- you need to use Transformers to split out your consuming devices into groups of 1 kW for regular Wire or 2 Kw for Conductive Wire in order to prevent overload damage.

[taterbug26]

@PhailRaptor

Thank you for taking the time to explain this. That was the best explanation of how to set up power that I have heard. I am off to give it a try!