How to use correctly solar panels

[Pencammm]

Heelo i try play with a solar panels on my base, but these five solar panels just suply my medical room. No power suply for refinery, assembler etc. Why?

my base look like:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/scPrPA4.jpg[/img]

[Lothic]

do you have batteries?

[Karmaterrorᵁᴷ]

You need a lot more solor pannels. They dont produce much power at all. As lothic said aswell some batteries will help to store the power :)

[Nihl]

batteries must be. 5 solars will not power up all your things Only one at most. One solar panel fully working (directly pointed at sun) will produce 140kw, refinery will burn 560kw without any modules.
Assembler have same power need as refinery, so arelady you have 1.1MW of power demand just for this two. Medical bay consumes only 2kw so its not a big deal. Your current MAXIMUM power output will be around 700kw. looking by current stage of things, you may have actually output on level of 500kw. You need at least 10-12 solar panels now.


One baterry can have output of 4MW (4000kw), and on full output will last like 15 minutes (maximum sotrage is 1mwh). Place 2 batteires and you'll have enought stored power and enought output to run all 3. you need to remember that after dark you will run only at batteries. one will drain quick. You may need add 4-5 more solar panels and dont use refinery and assembler (idle power consumption is only 1kw) until time that your batteries are fully charged.

[Pencammm]

Oh thanks good to know, so some of panels will be good to give a power to simple mining car? i mean a car with 6x wheel, metal detector, cocpit, some of small cargo?

[Pembroke]

Wheel powered vehicles are very economical so you can run even big vehicles with just a few panels.

Of course, wheeled vehicles are plagued by *other* problems like exploding into orbit for any reason or none but yes, otherwise quite energy efficient.

[Torres]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=367344570

[Aterr_Terradon]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=380993690

Very much like the Mod @Torres posted above, except that it does not need a Programmable Block or Timer. Pretty much all of the advice posted for the OP is accurate. I have a YouTube vid demonstrating the "Midspace's Experimental Solar Tracker" that I'll link below. My strategy on Solar is to use reactors at the start and build batteries and Solar Panels as resources allow. I try to allow 6 panels for each Refinery/Assembler and using the Tracker Mod they are more efficient. I also use the Azimuth Mega Mod Pack for the Azimuth Batteries, they have a max charge of 9MW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoDfXjPG6DI&lc=z220gbtbxuzgs54yz04t1aokgn1iwsbulo1h32b2tub0bk0h00410

Another Vid
https://youtu.be/y4A_4wZDjpw

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=472832143

[Baratheon79]

For more vanilla options, as already suggested, you should build some batteries, and probably more solar panels.

On my mothership in my survival game, I currently have 16 solar panels, which is honestly nowhere near enough. However, it is enough to power the ship's conveyor network and all the doors (and maybe a few other things). And I have enough batteries onboard to fully run the ship for a couple of hours if necessary, in the event that, for whatever reason, my reactors run dry. So basically, I treat solar panels as an emergency backup power source in that instance.

[Erzherzoghans]

If you are just looking to use solar and batteries then you want to place power efficiency modules on the refineries and assemblers at least until you have more solar and batteries and then you can swap out some of those modules for other useful modules.

Using rotors is the most efficient way to use solar panels as well as oxygen farms but rotors can sometimes play havoc with the game engine. There are quite a few mods and scripts out there that you can use and some of them were already suggested.

If you do not want to use rotors or if you can't then it is a matter of looking how the sun rotates around the planet and then placing solar panels at the rising location as well as the location where it sets. You might want to set some flat on the ground for the mid day sun. The panels for the rising and setting sun you might want to have them be as high as possible to try to get the most out of the sun. With this method you are likely going to need at least twice as much panels if not more.

On one world I had to go quite far with just solar panels and batteries since I could not find Uranium.