do power transformers not go both ways?

[https://imgur.com/a/MdHmk6F]

does it not step the power up from a normal wire into a hevi-watt wire? do I have to have all my power generators on the hevi-watt? >.>

[John Hadley]

Power transformers transfer excess power only from the large side of the transformer to the small side. If you want to transfer power to a heavi watt wire from a normal wire, you connect the normal wire to the large side and the heavi watt wire to the small side.

[Star Paladin]

Also, the "o" key rotates stuff, so you can switch the side the large/small are on.

[https://imgur.com/a/MdHmk6F]

Originally posted by John Hadley:

Power transformers transfer excess power only from the large side of the transformer to the small side. If you want to transfer power to a heavi watt wire from a normal wire, you connect the normal wire to the large side and the heavi watt wire to the small side.

oh.
that's not really how a power transformer should work, but thanks lol

[https://imgur.com/a/MdHmk6F]

so what's up with this?
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1319911725
got 240 watts on that circut and it's showing it's overloaded.
and the hevi-watt is showing as overloaded with like .8/0?

[Mechanoid]

Originally posted by king(strange)james488:

got 240 watts on that circut and it's showing it's overloaded.

An actual overload will show wires taking damage.

Yellow circuits are ones which are draining batteries faster than generators can keep up (or are in danger of doing so) where as white circuits are ones where there is a large surplus of energy which will let batteries continue to charge.

In order to actually overload, the active drain (in watts) on a wire has to be exceeding the allowed wattage of the wire. Standard wire allows 1,000w of devices which is four gas pumps, or eight algae deoxydizers; 960w (or even up to 200 floor lamps) However if you were to build a fifth gas pump or ninth deoxydizer and that device activates, the total used wattage would be over the 1000w wire limit and actually overload the wire then.

Also:
Mixing wire types is a bad idea if they have different wattage ratings. If you mixed conductive wire and regular wire, when the circuit exceeds 1000w the normal wire will start to overload and take damage (but the conductive wire should be fine; i'm not aware if the game looks at specific wires when overloading or just any wire in the circuit.)

[Eloi Monk]

Originally posted by king(strange)james488:

so what's up with this?
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1319911725
got 240 watts on that circut and it's showing it's overloaded.
and the hevi-watt is showing as overloaded with like .8/0?

The red wire on the left side is overloaded.

Edit: Or maybe not... looks like it's just switched off. In any case, when a wire is overloaded, it will be red.

[John Hadley]

When it says 0.74 kW / 0 kW the first number represents the amount of power currently flowing through the circuit and the second number represents the maximum amount of power consumption that devices in this circuit can consume if they are all activated at once.

Yellow does not mean a circuit is currently overloaded. It means that the *maximum* amount of power consumption on the circuit if everything is turned on is less than the *maximum* amount of power generation in the circuit. A power transformer is like a battery not like a generator, so it looks at your circuit and sees 360 max power draw and 0 max power generation. 0 is less than 360 so the circuit is colored yellow. That's just an indication to you that this circuit does not have enough power to sustain itself at 100% power generation and 100% power consumption. That's ok because it isn't meant to sustain itself. The power transformer is sustaining it.

The amount of power your circuit is currently transmitting from the battery into transformers then into other circuits at the moment in the screenshot is 0.74 kW (740 W) of power, which is less than 20 kW so it will cause no damage to heavi watt wire. The maximum amount of power that the consumers on the circuit will draw is 0 kW because there are not any power consumers hooked to the circuit, just batteries and transformers.

That's how you get the two numbers where it says Circuit Status: 0.74 kW / 0 kW. That 0 doesn't mean that the circuit can only provide 0 kW of power, it means it only consumes a maximum of 0 kW of power itself. All of the 0.74kW of wire being transferred currently is being consumed on other circuits,

[https://imgur.com/a/MdHmk6F]

so pretty much I did have to hook the generators directly into the hevi-watt for it to work...
that's really not how a power transformer should work, I hope eventually it gets changed to work more realistically.

[John Hadley]

You don't have to put your power generators on the heavi watt circuit for them to work. Here's an example from my own game.

Circuit 1 (standard wire) - 800W of generators, 600W of consumers

2 Manual Generators (+400W each))
Large Battery
Small Battery
2 Massage Tables (-240W each)
Super Computer (-120W)
Power transformer that passes excess power to circuit 2

Circuit 2 (standard wire) - 600W of consumers:

CO2 skimmer (-120W each)
2 Water Pumps (-240W each)
Power transformer that passes excess power to circuit 3

Circuit 3 (heavi watt wire) - 1200W of consumers:
Large Battery
Ore Refinery (-1200W)

I started off with a super computer, one manual generator, and battery so I could do research here. Later when my duplicants started getting stressed I needed some massage tables to relieve their stress, so I built two of them, but two massage tables require 480W of power to run at the same time and if the super computer was also running that's 600W, so I added an additional manual genator.

Now at this point, I needed a water pump and a CO2 skimmer because my base was building up too much carbon dioxide and it was starting to choke the guys working at this station on the computer. Initially I hooked it in the same circuit with the super computer and that was fine because it only had 960W of power consumption max so it would not exceed 1000W. The generators only provided 800W of power, but the battery could store excess from times of light use to use to add in that additional 180W during brief heavy use periods.

At this point, I decided that I needed an ore refinery. The ore refinery first needs to be filled with water, then it needs 1200W of power. I added a liquid pump to pump water into it but if I put it on the circuit with the super computer, 2 massage tables, CO2 skimmer and its pump that would be 1200W consumption which would burn the wire, so I needed to split these power consumers into multiple circuits. I separated the non-emergency, occasional use pumps and skimmer into a secondary circuit that has 600W of consumers. The emergency-use massage tables along with my constant use research station, which take priority are on the primary circuit that gets the first chance to use the power.. It passes along excess power being generated or power already stored in its batteries to the secondary circuits when they need to run and there is something to spare.

To provide 1200W of power to the ore refinery, I needed to make a circuit with all heavi watt wires because normal wires will burn at over 1000W consumption. The refinery is something I only very rarely use, just to make one or two pieces of refined metal to allow me to build automation sensors and automation wires. Its requires a lot of power so I gave it its own dedicated battery so it wont just quit in the middle of refining one piece of metal if the stuff in the primary or secondary circuit needs the power ahead of it and the primary battery runs empty, but its not time sensitive so it can take as long as it needs to charge up that battery up before I manually operate it. By daisy-chaining it to the secondary circuit through another transformer it gets only what is left over after the super computer, the massage tables, the skimmer and its pump, and the pump that fills up the refinery with cooling water have taken what they need.

You can see how in mine the circuits that are being powered by the power transformers are yellow just like yours. That doesn't mean they aren't built correctly. It just means they have more total power consumers than power generators, which is the whole point of using the power transformer. I wouldn't need to pass excess power to those circuits if they had enough power generation of their own to handle all their needs.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1320011865

[John Hadley]

Oops, I played my game more and the circuit design I posted above does not work! It burns the wire when there is too much power drain at one time in the primary circuit due to the transformer drawing power at the same time as the other stuff on the primary circuit. I looked at it while it was burning and it showed power drain of 1443 on the primary circuit which is definitely over 1000W and will allow the normal wire to burn.

What this means is that the power transformer must be seen as a consumer of up to 1000W of power all by itself. I had thought that it would only transfer excess power up to the wire limit of 1000W but it can consume up to 1000W whether it is excess power or not. That means the power transformer must be placed as the *only* consumer of power on a normal 1000W wire or the circuit can potentially exceed 1000W and burn.

It would seem that the only valid and useful circuits for transformer use on 1000W wire are:

A) Consumer circuit - A circuit fed by the output of a power transformer. It must have 1000W or less power consumers operating at once to consume power. The circuit can optionally have batteries and/or generators in it so that it can assist or act as a self-powered circuit when the transformer is not feeding it power. It only makes sense to connect this to a 20 kW circuit because otherwise you may as well just omit the transformer and connect the consumers directly.

B) Generator circuit - A circuit that feeds the input of a power transformer. It can have generators and optional batteries that only power the input of a single transformer and nothing else. The output of that transformer would connect to a 20 kW circuit that can have optional consumers, generators, batteries, and transformers as long as the consumers and transformers add up to less than 20 kW of concurrent power consumption (with each transformer counting as 1 kW of power consumption).

Essentially a 20 kW circuit must act as the power "bank" where excess power sent from 1 kW generator circuits and which distributes the power to the transformers of 1 kW consumer circuits as well as to any devices directly connected to the 20 kW circuit, The 20 kW wire does not have to have any generators. It is needed because it can power more than one transformer without burning since the transformer itself consumes 1 kW power and any additional consumer or transformer beyond that will exceed the 1 kW limit of normal wire.

[John Hadley]

I remodeled my broken transformer circuit to share power from the two manual generators.

First, I made sure that the generators only power one transformer and nothing else. This gives them 1000W of potential load due to the transformer, which is the most that a normal wire can handle.

Next, I made a 20 kW wire to use as a power bank to collect the power sent from the generator circuit and share it with multiple circuits that I want to consume power. Because it isn't limited to 1 kW it can power multiple transformers.

Finally, I made sure that each circuit on normal wire was limited to 1000W of consumption or less (they are each 600W) and each circuit on heavi watt wire was limited to 20 kW consumption (the refinery circuit has 1.2 kW of max consumption and the power bank circuit has 3 kW of max power consumption -- 1 kW for each transformer it is powering.)

Now nothing burns, and I'm powering 2400W worth of machines for part-time use with only 800W worth of generators.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1320846621

[https://imgur.com/a/MdHmk6F]

it would be much easier if the transformers just stepped the power up AND down like they should :P