how to make electricity work

[Masquerade]

I've got water, boilers and steam engines hooked up but nothings working, any help?

[Ragnaman]

Water pump -> pipes -> boiler -> steam engine -> electric wires
.....................................^ fuel feeder

(no electricity is produced if there is no demand)

[Masquerade]

...forgot the wires

[QuackerJack]

Shame

[tomwithtime]

Originally posted by Ragnaman:

(no electricity is produced if there is no demand)

This is probably where most people get stuck.

[Masquerade]

ok I made the engine work but the performance is really low but with full avaliable performance. Is this good or bad?

[@MidLifeGamingGB]

Performance is like demand. So as long as demand is less than available performance you should be good. As you get bigger plan your power to be able to expand and add to it.

[T-Bone Biggins]

Originally posted by Joker™:

ok I made the engine work but the performance is really low but with full avaliable performance. Is this good or bad?

Available performance should be renamed "boiler efficiency" because it's showing how hot the water is that the engine is receiving, if the water is 100% max temp then you have maximum performance. Now add another engine to the same boilers that will drop, let's say to 80% available performance. This means you have 80% of the boilers needed to heat the water to fully satisfy both engines if they are outputting at max capacity.

Performance is what capacity your combined steam engines are running at. If the bar is barely at 10% that means you are using 10% of your powerplant's capacity to produce power. You can add more stuff. If performance bar is peaked full that means you are using as much power as the powerplant can make and likely not enough, you might see some stuff showing not enough electricity.

[Masquerade]

ahh ok I understand, thanks a lot

[AlexMBrennan]

Available performance should be renamed "boiler efficiency" because it's showing how hot the water is that the engine is receiving

Would you rename solar panels stats while we are at it? Would the game be clearer if solar panels operated at 60kW boiler effiency?

The description is perfectly correct - steam engines can produce up to 510kW in ideal conditions, and the "available performance" bar shows how much of that theoretical 510kW the steam engine can actually produce. That's sorta what the word "available" means.

[T-Bone Biggins]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

Available performance should be renamed "boiler efficiency" because it's showing how hot the water is that the engine is receiving

Would you rename solar panels stats while we are at it? Would the game be clearer if solar panels operated at 60kW boiler effiency?

The description is perfectly correct - steam engines can produce up to 510kW in ideal conditions, and the "available performance" bar shows how much of that theoretical 510kW the steam engine can actually produce. That's sorta what the word "available" means.

Being an a$$ just shows your inadequacy. Then you made a very stupid sentence as a follow up so this will be my only response to you since I like to keep my contact with your sorts minimal. As far as steam engines are concerned available performance is a vague description for new players and there could be a more clear description on what's happening than the bars we have right now. Since this game is in development I am certain we will at some point get a change so it's more clear what is happening with our power plants.

[ConductorSavy TTV]

How about simply adding a word to the "performance" bar saying CURRENT PERFORMANCE while the other remains as Available? ._. What Alex said is very truthful though about the steam engines.

As for what is happening with power plants, it's pretty simple to look at really... Just make sure things that require fuel (Aka the boilers for steam engines) are being fed enough and making sure everything is linked up correctly via power poles. And if you want more power, just make either more steam engine lines, or just start making fields of solar panels and accumulators. The accumulators can store power for use when the solar panels turn off for the night, and will charge during the day should there be plenty of available power being generated. (Most people go pure solar panels/accumulators late game as they don't need any real maintainence aside from making sure they're wired up correctly.)

Hell, if you want to know what's happening with power, just click a power pole too. It'll tell you what on that pole's network is currently providing power and what is using up power.

[T-Bone Biggins]

Originally posted by Zerana Draconis-Zorah:

How about simply adding a word to the "performance" bar saying CURRENT PERFORMANCE while the other remains as Available? ._. What Alex said is very truthful though about the steam engines.

As for what is happening with power plants, it's pretty simple to look at really... Just make sure things that require fuel (Aka the boilers for steam engines) are being fed enough and making sure everything is linked up correctly via power poles. And if you want more power, just make either more steam engine lines, or just start making fields of solar panels and accumulators. The accumulators can store power for use when the solar panels turn off for the night, and will charge during the day should there be plenty of available power being generated. (Most people go pure solar panels/accumulators late game as they don't need any real maintainence aside from making sure they're wired up correctly.)

We do need an option to allow accumulators to be drained first in hybrid solar/steam setups without requiring the player to make logic switches out of conveyors, inserters, and smart containers. That should be high priority above most other things right now. I was merely making an example in my other post about what the bar means so that newer players could relate to it more easily, after a few hours most people should be able to grasp what the bars mean quite easily anyway.

[[LYF]Shadow]

for steam generator setups 14 Boilers to 10 generators works best, like this

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/495766099603383490/4D5755B6730B1F566D86BE545B503EEEF632B8BC/

You can also use long inserters to feed into a second row of boilers like this

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/495766099603398890/56E5719B2CF35ACB506801ED3531662D639F5924/

this setup does create alot of pollution but its also very efficient and can be easly upgraded with more rows for powering mega factorys (more so when you start creating solid fuel)

[Zferrell]

I stopped playing this game because I can never get the stupid things to work. I got it working once, but now everytime I try it will never draw power. I got the offshore pump in, I got all of the boilers working with fuel in them, all connected to steam engines, I got the electricity poles up but everytime I try to place anything down that draws electricty it just keeps telling me it still needs it. All of the steam engines are not blinking now, but nothing works. The first time I got it working which was a long time ago, I had to keep placing and then replacing the wires to get it to finally work. I feel like something is majorly wrong with this electricity system. I see so many people having a hard time with it, and it's an easy setup. Just seems to never work right.

[Lady Naween]

There is nothing wrong with the electricity system in the game. You are setting it up wrong, post a screenshot and we can help you troubleshoot it. The reason people get confused about it is they look at older vids/tutorials where you put it all in a row but that changed in 0.15.