How fast can batteries charge?

[MatthewCline]

According to the wiki's power circuits guide a tiny battery can absorb at most 100 W and a normal battery can absorb at most 200 W, but using debug mode it seems that batteries have no limit on how quickly the can absorb power.  Is this just a side effect of debug mode?

[Mutineer]

I noticed when I added Battery after the transformer, it sucks out batteries before transformer at no time. To me, it did look as max transformer speed of 5000W but i did not measure that, so it is just an empirical observation.

[crypticorb]

I just did a bit of testing, with some math, and it appears that debug functions exactly as non-debug enabled gameplay as far as the power mechanics work. I constructed the test scenario in debug, then removed the debug_enable.txt file to be certain.

My setup and test were with 6 NG generators, producing 4,800W of power, or 4,800J/s of energy. A large battery can store 40,000J of energy, so mathematically it should take 8.33 seconds to charge, if there is no limit. If there was a limit, it would accept only 200J/s of energy, and take 200 seconds to charge.

I clocked it at almost exactly 8 seconds, so it's accurate enough. Scaling up the test to 20 NG generators produced the same results, with proportionately faster charging. To answer your original question, there is no 100W or 200W charge rate limit on batteries.

 

Work Cited:

Myself, and Max.

RIP Max (4/29/1018 - 4/29/2018)

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

This mirrors my observations in game play.  If you're charging a battery through a transformer, then it maxes out at 5kw -- the limits of the transformer.

[beowulf2010]

52 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

This mirrors my observations in game play.  If you're charging a battery through a transformer, then it maxes out at 5kw -- the limits of the transformer.

Mine as well. Batteries charged directly by generators charge at a rate directly related to the generator's (or generator bank's) wattage and number of batteries while batteries "behind" transformers charge at 5kW (1kW per tick, 5 ticks per second) divided by the number of batteries. 

[Fury1SOG]

In the Ranching Upgrade Mk.1, I set up a switched battery system fed from one transformer. The switched batteries supplied power to two tepidizers.

I found that the tepidizers were draining the batteries faster than they could be charged. However, the recharge speed increased when I connected a second transformer.