Why is my power starting to overload?!!?!

[Rat King]

i have been connecting my wires to my buildings and now all of my wires are breaking. i don't want to restart and i need help quick! im running on one coal power plant. i tried using a smart battery and a transform but my power doesnt touch the smart battery for some reason! i need help!

[Chompman]

You may have too much of a power draw on the wires as normal wires can only run up to 1 kw and you may need to use transformers with them and heavi-watt wires.

[Rat King]

Originally posted by Chompman:

You may have too much of power draw on the wires as normal wires can only run up to 1 kw and you may need to use transformers with them and heavi-watt / conductive wires,

i tried using heavy watts but they also ignore my smart battery and it still messes up the wires

[Aemon Bane]

Screenshot? Based purely on what you've said it sounds like you've hooked up to many power consumers to a circuit made with too low grade of wire. However without a screenshot or screenshots it's impossible to know for certain that you haven't ran into a different problem.

Edit:The heavy-watt wire should never be getting overloaded by a single coal generator, the coal generator can barely produce as much energy in a full cycle as the heavy-watt wire can safely handle at any given moment.

[Chompman]

Make sure your layout with the batteries and transformers usually look like they have here:

https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Power_Transformer

The power generators and batteries need to go on one end while the draw goes on the other.

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Originally posted by Aemon Bane:

Screenshot? Based purely on what you've said it sounds like you've hooked up to many power consumers to a circuit made with too low grade of wire. However without a screenshot or screenshots it's impossible to know for certain that you haven't ran into a different problem.

Edit:The heavy-watt wire should never be getting overloaded by a single coal generator, the coal generator can barely produce as much energy in a full cycle as the heavy-watt wire can safely handle at any given moment.

Overloading a wire has nothing to do with your source of energy. Just because you have a single coal generator (600 Watts) doesn't mean that with a battery you can't draw more than 600 Watts. A battery counts as a power producer as well.

Situation A: Small transformer feeds a basic wire. Wire can never have more than 1000 Watts on it, even if you have more machines than it can handle. Instead machines will fight over who gets what power if they all try to work at once.

Situation B: Wire has a battery on it, so it has virtually infinite load potential. Make sure that you never have more than 1000 Watts of appliances running at once, or the wire will overload.

Producers:
Generators
Batteries
The small lower port of a power transformer

Consumers:
Appliances
The large upper port of a power transformer

Yes, a battery does not count as a consumer.

Overload happens when the consumers are allowed to consume more than the wire limit, and it doesn't matter how the circuit is laid out. Branching it doesn't branch out the power. All of the consumption hits all portions of the circuit at once. This means if you run heaviwatt trunk connected to normal wire for branches, your branches will likely burn even if the trunk is fine.

Instead run heaviwatt to the large port of a transformer, and normal wire from the small port with nothing connecting the two. This creates a separate circuit that the transformer guarantees at a voltage so long as it can pull it's cap.

Another note about transformers. Small will allow 1000 Watts or 1 kW each. You can have 2 feed one circuit in parallel. A large will allow 4 kW though which can overload a conductive wire. There are a few uses I've found for the large, but generally I just use 2 small ones for my conductive wire.

One such use for large transformers now is stepping down conductive heavi-watt to heaviwatt safely. 5 large transformers in parallel will allow 20 kW of power onto a heaviwatt wire.

[Aemon Bane]

While technically power producers don't affect whether or not a wire overloads, in an indirect way they do, in order for a coal generator which produces 600W to provide enough power to consumers to overload a heavy-watt wire that can safely handle a load of 20kW, your power consumers would have to be off for 36/37 of the time with enough batteries to store all that energy and enough power consumers to demand over 20kW all getting turned on at the same time.

So as I said a single coal generator should never be overloading a heavy-watt wire.

Edit: After doing that quick math I realize I was wrong in my previous comment, a coal generator can not even produce as much power in a cycle as a heavy-watt wire can handle at any given moment.

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Originally posted by Aemon Bane:

While technically power producers don't affect whether or not a wire overloads, in an indirect way they do, in order for a coal generator which produces 600W to provide enough power to consumers to overload a heavy-watt wire that can safely handle a load of 20kW, your power consumers would have to be off for 36/37 of the time with enough batteries to store all that energy and enough power consumers to demand over 20kW all getting turned on at the same time.

So as I said a single coal generator should never be overloading a heavy-watt wire.

Edit: After doing that quick math I realize I was wrong in my previous comment, a coal generator can not even produce as much power in a cycle as a heavy-watt wire can handle at any given moment.

You are ignoring the possibility that he very well may have heaviwatt connected to normal wire which I also brought up. Better to give him the actual mechanics rather than say, "That's impossible" after all, he's having it happen to him right now.

[zOldBulldog]

The most likely scenario:

- You have devices on the circuit that can potentially draw more than 1kw.
- Not all devices kick on at the same time, so excess power charges the battery.
- At some moments the devices kick on at the same time, pulling more than 1kw. The battery has it available and happily releases it, overloading the wire.

Quick fix:

- Separate your circuit into multiples using transformers (they are named wrong, think of them as circuit isolators that limit the power flow to the rating of the transformer).

- Place a battery on each circuit, OR use a single battery on the generator side but use a heavier capacity wire between the generator and the transformers.


A common design is:

- Generator bank
- Battery
- Transformer (of no more than the capacity of the wire going back to generators)
- Heavy-watt wire bus
- Transformer (of the capacity of the wire to your buildings)
- wire
- Buildings/devices.

[Bokonon]

Simplest thing is to separate what you have into a few discrete circuits and add more coal gen/smart batteries. You're using more power than the wire can handle and using it faster than the gen can generate it so the battery never has any "extra" for itself. Transformers not needed at all until you have mass power generation and heavy watt wire.

[Rat King]

I have been using 2 coal generators. When they start up, my smart battery won’t gain power and my wire would go through the transformer and break all my wires. I’ll provide a screenshot as soon as I get home from school

[Bokonon]

Originally posted by ScottishLeaguehero764:

I have been using 2 coal generators. When they start up, my smart battery won’t gain power and my wire would go through the transformer and break all my wires. I’ll provide a screenshot as soon as I get home from school

Screenshot is always best. With 2 coal gens there is absolutely no need for any transformers. I get that ONI is complex and can be confusing but always look for the simplest solution. There's a great quote I've seen posted here (I'd seen it before years ago) that I'll poorly paraphrase: "You know you're done engineering something not when you've added as much as you can but when you've removed as much as you can and still have it function". KISS principle.

[Aemon Bane]

I think the original quote your going for is
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Which is a quote that very succinctly tells the mindset of an engineer/ writer/ artist. It is sometimes misunderstood as it fails to mention what you mentioned "when you've removed as much as you can and still have it function"

[Bokonon]

Originally posted by Aemon Bane:

I think the original quote your going for is
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Which is a quote that very succinctly tells the mindset of an engineer/ writer/ artist. It is sometimes misunderstood as it fails to mention what you mentioned "when you've removed as much as you can and still have it function"

Yup, that's it! Great quote, my only quibble with what you say is I'd say "tells the IDEAL mindset", I work in software and have known many engineers who overcomplicate everything :)

[Rat King]

Originally posted by zOldBulldog:

The most likely scenario:

- You have devices on the circuit that can potentially draw more than 1kw.
- Not all devices kick on at the same time, so excess power charges the battery.
- At some moments the devices kick on at the same time, pulling more than 1kw. The battery has it available and happily releases it, overloading the wire.

Quick fix:

- Separate your circuit into multiples using transformers (they are named wrong, think of them as circuit isolators that limit the power flow to the rating of the transformer).

- Place a battery on each circuit, OR use a single battery on the generator side but use a heavier capacity wire between the generator and the transformers.


A common design is:

- Generator bank
- Battery
- Transformer (of no more than the capacity of the wire going back to generators)
- Heavy-watt wire bus
- Transformer (of the capacity of the wire to your buildings)
- wire
- Buildings/devices.

Thank you so much! You saved my colony! all i had to do was split the circuit in half! you deserve better