How to Power Grid?

[MadArtillery]

Ive always found running power to turn very very complicated as the game goes on and have eternal, sometimes base killing troubles with it. Ghettoing out separate power grids for things really stretches my manpower out and I figure there has to be a better way to run a power grid than half hazardly popping wheels and wood burners around the base whenever the grid starts to commmit suicide. I haven't had much success fiddling with transformers and advanced types of wires when I tried it nuked all my metal supplies so bad the base died when the grid started burning anyway.

[jballar]

get to an oil biome (make sure the temperature is not too high) and get lead. Both conductive wire and heavy watt conductive wire use refined metal, which lead is one. Once you have lead, then build a power spine with heavy watt conductive wire. It can handle 50kw, which is a ton of power. Make sure you have smart batteries also and automation.

Connect your power sources to the heavy watt conductive wire, along with the batteries. Make sure that all batteries are hooked up to the heavy watt conductive wire.

With automation wire, connect a smart battery to your power source. You can set when the power source comes on and off. If you have multiple power sources, I normally set them at different rates so not every power source turns on at the same time, unless you have a heavy power draw.

From the heavy watt wire, connect to large power transformers. Each transformer has a 4kw capacity, but you want a max potential load of 2kw for the regular conductive wire.

Then just rinse and repeat. Break up your power consuming areas to less than 2kw and use the large transformer.

I currently have 4 petroleum generators, 2 hydrogen generators, 2 natural gas generators, and 2 coal generators on my main power spine. I then have 8-9 different large transformers connecting to different areas. The power spine runs all the way up and down the map so I can access it everywhere.


Having said all of this, it takes a long time to set up. Before I had it set up, I just used regular wire, smart battery and the power producer per line. I just made sure the potential wattage was not too high.

[MadArtillery]

Quite the helpful looking post! I do have two questions though.

What's an oil biome look like? I don't think I've ever actually been to one and want to know what to look for.

And the more important question! How do you usually set up your automation? It's a feature I've never actually used before. I'm not sure what you mean by having things set up not to draw at once. Almost everything (mostly pumps) need to run constantly and they tend to be the prime reason my grids start dieing.

Edit:

Make that three, how do the transformers actually work?

[jballar]

The oil biome is typically near the bottom of the map. Keep digging down. I normally dig 3 wide, put the ladder in the center, fire pole on one side and the other clear, for more airflow. If you come across a carbon dioxide area, place an algae terrarium so the dupes can go there to breathe. Otherwise they will keep going up to breathe.

Once you get to the oil biome (the color is more brownish and has pockets of oil), start mining. Lead is common.

The smart battery automation is fairly easy. Automation wires are in a separate building area, similar to gas and plumbing pipes, so they do not interefere with anything. In the automation overlay, there will be a plug icon to the power source and the smart battery. Simply connect the two. Click on the smart battery, in normal view, and at the bottom there are 2 settings. The top setting shuts the generator off, and the bottom setting turns it on. So if you set the battery to turn on at 50%, then it will turn on the generator. I normally leave the top setting to 100%, so that means the generator will run until the battery is at 100%.

You can tie in multiple generators to a single smart battery or have several batteries. I normally have my petroleum generators to kick on at 60%, hydrogen generators at 50%, and so on. I have my coal generators very low, just in case there is a massive demand for power.

They can be anywhere on the heavy watt conductive wire.

The wires in the game have different max loads. A regular wire has 1kw, conductive 2kw, etc... If there is a power load, anywhere on the circuit that is larger than the max for that wire, it will overload and take damage. If it is not fixed within a timeframe, it will break and sever the power to the rest of the circuit. The transformer allows you to use regular or conductive wire for smaller areas because the heavy watt wires cannot go through blocks and have a massive negative decor.

So you make a power spine away from your base, place transformers near it, then run regular conductive wire to your locations. If you hover your mouse over the wire, it will tell you how much power is currently being used and the potential max. Keep the potential max under 2kw and use conductive wire, and you are good.

[jballar]

There are plenty of youtube videos that can better explain than I can. John Francis, Advanced Toni, Brothgar and probably the best

[asanger]

Oil biome is usually near the bottom of the map and is full of pools of crude oil, diamond and lead. It's generally fairly hot so you will want atmo suits for your dupes.

For your power grid once you have built the heavy wire around your base, you want to connect all the generators to it then have smart batteries set to turn them on and off as you need the power.
In my last base I had steam turbines and hydrogen power always on to supply power and burn off my excess hydrogen.
I then had the smart batteries for my natural gas generators set to turn on if the battery power fell below 60% and to turn off again once power was over 80%. This tops up the batteries but doesn't overfill them to avoid wasting power from my steam and hydrogen generators.
I then had coal generators set to turn on at 40 and off at 60 to top the batteries up under heavy load.
And finally Petroleum generators coming on at 10% and turning off at 50% for emergency heavy loads. They rarely get used unless I am launching multiple rockets at the same time and powering lots of gantries.
Smart batteries in general just save you a ton of fuel.

Transformers allow you to draw a limited amount of power from your main grid to run conductive wires at 2KW a time through your base to power your buildings.
You want to keep your dupes away from heavy watt wire as much as possible due to the heavy decor penalty it has.

[Bokonon]

Originally posted by MadArtillery:

Quite the helpful looking post! I do have two questions though.

What's an oil biome look like? I don't think I've ever actually been to one and want to know what to look for.

And the more important question! How do you usually set up your automation? It's a feature I've never actually used before. I'm not sure what you mean by having things set up not to draw at once. Almost everything (mostly pumps) need to run constantly and they tend to be the prime reason my grids start dieing.

Edit:

Make that three, how do the transformers actually work?

1. Oil biome looks like ... well not to be a jerk but ... a biome with oil in it. Typically just dig towards the bottom of the map and you can't miss it (unless you have world traits that affect oil like Irregular Oil) oil biome is usually right above the magma at the bottom of the map. You'll also see diamond and fossil in the oil biome.

2. Huge can of worms with no simple solution. If you're starting with automation, the simplest thing is a coal (or wood I suppose) generator hooked up to a smart battery. Set a threshold, for example 60%/100% and the smart battery will disable the generator (saving fuel) when it hits 100% and doesn't reactivate the generator until the smart battery reaches 60%.

3. Transformers separate circuits is probably the most important thing they do. They also have a "high" side and a "low" side, hook heavy watt wire (up to 20kW for regular and 50kW for conductive) and the transformer will limit the low side to 1kW (small) or 4kW (large).

[MadArtillery]

Thanks for the help everyone! I'll try to put it to the best use I can. Going to have to do a lot of digging on one side of my base for a fancy power spine and digging down for oil. Hopefully this base will finally survive!

[Bokonon]

Just keep an eye on the usage of any circuit before you add more loads to it and you should be fine, add more circuits (HWW -> transformer -> conductive wire) when one gets too full. More automation can help reduce usage as well. I like to have light on my research area but I use a dupe sensor to make sure the light is only on when a dupe is researching for one example.

Good luck and have fun!!!