Power Consumption

[Mackenzie]

Hi Engineers,

I've always been pretty bad at understanding electricity so I was hoping the community could help me figure out what is going on.

My ship is a standard starting planetary lander. Large ship equipped with a small reactor and 4 batteries. I have tons of refined uranium in the reactor. I manually control the batteries, two discharging, 2 recharging at all times and carefully monitor the levels during flight.

What I don't understand is where all my power is being used when I'm mining with the refinery set to off. I can have it turned on, it will say the remaining two batteries deplete in 12 minutes, or I can turn it off and it still says 12 minutes and they'll be fully depleted. Turn off all thrusters, manually and air vent. Still 12 minutes. It takes slightly longer to recharge 2 then to deplete 2 when seemingly nothing is going on or being used. The ship is on the ground, intertia dampeners are off and the thrusters are not actually drawing power while it sits there.

What could be draining the batteries so quickly that toggling the refinery and thrusters makes no difference to the time to deplete batteries?

[jacobellinger]

do you have an air vent or did you remove that? because the oxigen genorator takes power. and the vest takes power. other then this I don't know. You can try turning off the thrusters completely and see if that does anything.

[Mackenzie]

jacobellinger, the air vent seems to make no difference. Same goes for the thrusters being completely shut off manually or not. Batteries still were draining to something. I'm not sure exactly what it was still but I can finally idle (med bay on for easy hydrogen refilling etc, engines on, thrusters on but not used). I removed the refinery and the assembler, apparently just existing on the ship was causing a massive power drain. Now I can idle on the ground and last for 280+ days, so I'm glad that is resolved.

[Vollauro]

I find Batteries like to be buggy when you have two sets of batteries, one on recharge and the other on discharge. Typically I leave them as they are, not using Recharge or Discharge or Auto, and I find it works fine.

[Zapier]

Yeah, the batteries for me always show that when some are recharge and some discharge, the ones on discharge and charging the ones recharging, so my power is 'draining' fast into the others. The only way that seems to provide some semi-resonable operation is to set all the batteries to the same setting or leave them with all boxes unchecked so they recharge and discharge at the same time (which has led to other issues but at least its more reasonable).

[Mackenzie]

My only problem with that is running out of battery power = no flying. At the really early stage of still flying around in your starting lander, I find it much more effective to have half of the batteries charging with the other half discharging and swapping them out when I'm suddenly low on fuel. There definitely seems to be something buggy about how much is consumed at what times, but removing the assembler and refinery seems to have helped substantially. Waiting around for recharging so early on feels very unproductive in 1-1-1 survival.

I mined 110 kg of iron by hand a few minutes ago and my ship was left powered on the whole time with 19 days of fuel, and stayed at 19. 2 charging, 2 discharging.

You know how when you have a drill ship on a planet and the more you collect and mine (ship mass) the more thrusters you need to fight gravity and move the ship? I noticed while filling my cargo with the iron ore that hovering was starting to take power instead of super low idling, and I think that maybe it isn't a bug after all, that it's just the mass of iron, being 30% of the entire ship's mass it's understandable that hovering with interia dampeners is actually using some thruster power draw. Resting it on the ground set it back from 30 mins to 19 days however.

I have a couple dozen hours in SE total so far, and the entire time I have been on the Earth like planet, never have played in space yet. Been learning my way around the bugs and survival planet life.

[Keyboard Wario]

From the wiki:

---
Recharge Toggle

A Battery can recharge regardless of whether its Recharge setting is toggled or not, but if it's set to Recharge it will ONLY recharge and will not discharge or provide power. During this state, the battery will only draw power from the surrounding grid to store in its reserves. It will not discharge again till the player toggles "recharge" once again. Be aware that the charging process is not 100% efficient. Regardless of where the energy is coming from, only about 83.33% of the energy will actually be stored in the battery, the remainder being wasted due to an inherent inefficiency.
---

So if you are using your batteries to charge your other batteries (some discharging some charging) you are losing significant energy.

[Mackenzie]

The inefficiency I can see being a bit of a problem, but I don't mind it 'transfering' the energy back and forth, given how long it will last for once you have it under good control and understanding. It works well with the small reactor. This is purely temporary while I'm utilizing the starting lander anyway. Much appreciated sharing that bit of info though, great to know, thank you!

[Keyboard Wario]

there are 3 *main reasons to use batteries:
1- havn't found uranium & silver yet. - batteries essentially let you pretend you have more reactors than you do by trading 20% of the power to burst it out later. if you are not doing something that is overloading your reactor, you should never discharge the battery unless you (see point 2)...
2- have solar panels - only way to store solar is with battery.
3-if it doesn't need a lot of power/backup generator - for example a scout rover takes almost no power, or a medical bay can be powered by a single battery when fully charged for 150 hours. It is a good idea to attach the battery as close to the med bay as possible so if you sustain damage the med bay can still respawn you after everything else is shut down, broken apart etc.

[Keyboard Wario]

honorable mention goes to using the free 30% charge on batteries to power kinetic/explosive manmade rockets.

[Mackenzie]

Excellent tips, thank you. Was wondering why my solar panels weren't actually powering my machinery. They were filling my two batteries super slowly though, I still had to build a reactor. If a station has 2 charged batteries and a small reactor, would have all three turned on and the batteries discharging give the batteries priority? As in would batteries use their power before uranium is consumed?