Unexplained Battery Drain

[Glottis]

I've got this ship running off batteries but it's draining 300kW an hour even without anything else drawing power. I've literally shut down the entire ship, turned the battery back on at it drains apparently into nothing. If I turn on a second battery they share the load and each drain 150ish. Even with everything on my ship on (minus the ion engines) I don't have this sort of load.

Anyone know if this is a bug or how to fix it? I've tried restarting and on/offing but I can't really grind them down to fix because I won't have the power cells to make them again.

[Prof. hulk]

if your in the cockpit when the drain is happening it could be you that is the drain

[EmberStar]

Would you consider uploading the ship to the workshop? This might be something specific to your design, or maybe even mods you are using. It's going to be hard for people to do more than wild guessing without a clear idea of what is equipped on your ship.

[Glottis]

Same even when checking from a control panel.

But, I figured out 200 of the 360ish. Turns out the o2/h2 generators don't turn off when you use Y to shutdown ship so once I turned the battery back on they began drawing power again.

There was also another block using about 50 even though it was idle, turning it off and on a few times seemed to clear that up too.

I'll have another play around tomorrow to see If I can figure it out for myself... that's half the fun of the game so far anyway :)

[Spaceman Spiff]

Awhile back KSH changed the O2/H2 generators to be BIG power drains on a grid.

[Xilo The Odd]

one thing you might do is set everything on the ship that isnt a single timer + batteries into a group of blocks.

set this group to be targeted by the timer, when the timer is activated, it'll set ALL those blocks to off till it cycles them back to on. this can help cut down on power drain considerably. but it also means the ship in motion will be out of control when this is active. to remedy this, put a sensor on the ship that'll turn everything on again and the timer block off. this will make it avoid colliding with an asteroid or anything else and allow it to brake.

[Mr B.]

There a script that shows the highest power use. Will post tonight if I can find it.

[Glottis]

@Spaceman Ha. Well, that was before my time. I only started playing last week. It was a hard balance between keeping my H2 full and using silly little hydrogen engines to charge the batteries (and a few pointless solar panels). Luckily I found a uranium deposit so I might have to switch to nuclear.

@Xilo I've got all those blocks already on my ship and have some stuff set to turn off when I'm not onboard (via the sensor), but I can't do it with most because it needs to keep functioning while I'm off mining or building nearby.

@Mr B. Thanks, I think I've found the one you're talking about "Automatic LCDs 2" and I've got it setup to show the top power draws. It still doesn't quite add up to the total, but it's not so far out that I mind anymore. Before I couldn't figure out where the power was going, but now I know, I'll just have to work around it.

[MCFreddie777]

Gravity generator - If your ship has one, and it has large height / width / depth field, it drains lot of power - I just saved about 6 hours of battery just by shrinking those fields.

[Spaceman Spiff]

An 11-month-old topic brought back to life in an instant. The power of the Internet.

[Wick]

Originally posted by Spaceman Spiff:

Awhile back KSH changed the O2/H2 generators to be BIG power drains on a grid.

Since the thread was already necro's, I'll just comment that if you have multiple O2/H2 generators, they ALL want to run if there's the tiniest need for either gas. So you sitting in your cockpit breathing can be responsible for 20 generators running to supply you with breathing air - even if you have an O2 tank. Got to keep that O2 tank filled!