Losing power randomly.

[Vent]

My Production is around 10,000 MW, my max consumption is around 6,000 MW. I was having water issues with coal plants and too many fuel generators, I have fixed those issues.

The coal plants have plenty of Coal and water, when the factory shuts down I check them and are fully supplied, so there shouldn't be a problem there.

I reworked my fuel generators and they are running constantly as well. I even have Awesome Sinks to get rid of any excess material production that would cause the refineries to stop producing fuel. Also when I check the fuel generators during a shutdown, they have a full supply of fuel.

Also during these power losses all I have to do to get the entire factory running again is just resetting a circuit breaker (random power pole) after a random short time (less than a min or two, I didn't actually time it.)

About batteries (the building sized ones), they say that they provide 100MW of Power. So would that mean I would need to build 60 Batteries for my factory to last for 1 second longer? 60 batteries would be 6,000 MW so that would be one second worth of power for the full factory, right? Would it help if I built 10,000 batteries lol?

Is there some kind of bug shutting down my factory? I tried looking online, but they say to check coal, water, and fuel, which I did. Maybe I am still missing something super obvious. but I don't think my factory should be shutting down.

[Drum]

1 fully charged battery will give you 100MW for 1 full hour. It's a great tool to compensate spikes in power use.

[Zaflis]

1 power storage has input of 100 MW but it can output at infinite rate. If i'm doing math right..(60 min * (100 / 6000)) , i'm seeing it could output that 6 GW for 1 minute. 10 power storages is 10 minutes then.

[Sam Richardson]

Sometimes the power grid can grow some "spikes" through what you produced in power if all machines are in use at once accidently . Then you have it, a shutdown. Dont underestimate the power usage of an overclocked Manufacturer and such, or the sheer amount of machines you didnt think about. Even if you have anough water and coal, you have to much machines doing to much things... poor litle coal gen..RIP you where a brave one ^^

[Maehlice]

Do you have a LOT of your stuff underclocked? I'm not sure if it's still an issue, but there was a time when loading a game (and sometimes autosaving, though I never experienced it) the power consumption would spike to 100% before dropping back down to the correct consumption for its actual clock speed. The entire world doing this all at once was enough of a spike to knock out any power grid.

[Vent]

@Drumatiko thanks for that 1 hour of use info.

@Sam Richardson I figure max consumption would factor in all the machines hooked up to power currently drawing power and in standby or maybe idle. I was thinking any power spike would max out at max consumption even if all the machines hooked up to power were all running at the same time.

@Maehlice come to think about it I probably have less than 10 or 5 machines overclocked. I don't think it is happening around autosaving either.

I think I may just need to build 100 to 200 power storage buildings (5 or so at a time every hour), and hopefully that fixes it. But would building tons of power storage building lag out my game?

[Mister Fabulous]

Power storage takes an hour to charge if there is the full 100MW available. If you build 500 of them then the excess power used for charging will be divided among all of them. They discharge as fast as needed, there is no limit on output. You could have a single storage power a terawatt factory... for 5 seconds :) Also, it won't lag your game.

You need to look at your power graph. Is your max consumption over your capacity? When you lose power, are you going over your Capacity because too many things are running, or is your capacity dropping?

Saying your coal gens have coal and water isn't enough info. Are you checking when the power is out? Because they will fill with coal and any leftover water in the pipes when they aren't running. They may look fine when you get there but that could be because they had time to fill while shut down and you weren't looking.

If you are going over your capacity, then it's easy, build more generators. If your capacity is dropping, then you have set up your generators incorrectly and need to look there for the issue.

Either way power storage might not help with your problem overall. If your machines run too long and you're over your capacity then eventually you lose power anyway. If there's a problem with your generator setup and you're losing capacity, then power storage only prolongs your black out and you still have a problem. Simply adding power storage in either case isn't a solution.

[Songbird]

If your max consumption is under your capacity, your power will not go out. One of those things is simply not true. If your generators not producing consistently are the issue, the whole thing about batteries is irrelevant and just a diversion from the actual problem. I suggest looking at the power graph when power went out to see whether your generated power dipped or your consumed power spiked and adjust accordingly.

A MW is not a unit of energy but of power, so it isn't applicable for how much energy a battery can store. As mentioned above, batteries store 100 megawatt-hours of energy (or 360 gigajoules).

[Zaflis]

If you produce 5 GW of power, normally consume about 4.5 GW and then 1 random spike every minute for 1 seconds or something bring consume to 5.5 GW, then you need to realize that you only need 500 MW extra power from the battery... for 1 second. You don't need 500 batteries for that, 1 will do perfectly fine. However if you have 0 then your power-grid will shut down.

[Lapatong]

build batteries ....

[Mogges]

Having the same issue. I am producing 43 GW of power; old coal generators still running ( too lazy to dismantle them ), lots of oil / fuel generators and I have 13 nuclear plants. For 2 weeks I produced 43 GW, constant, one flat curve. Then out of a sudden it drops to 40,6 GW. Not a big loss, but it seems that one of my nuclear plants is not working..
Why?
How?

How can it be that you have such a drop in an infinite system, that was runnign for more than 2 weeks without any issues?

Checking the nuclear plants I have seen, that 2 of them have an "up and down" in their water consumption. You do not see a constant full vision panel, you see a fluctuation of water.
There is some bug with pipes ( I have read somewhere ), but checking all of them, maximum flow of 300 m3 is there, 3 pumps running at full capacity of 120 m3 each.
Do I hvae to desmantle and rebuild the pipes?

[Meewec]

Originally posted by Mogges:

How can it be that you have such a drop in an infinite system, that was runnign for more than 2 weeks without any issues?

Checking the nuclear plants I have seen, that 2 of them have an "up and down" in their water consumption. You do not see a constant full vision panel, you see a fluctuation of water.
There is some bug with pipes ( I have read somewhere ), but checking all of them, maximum flow of 300 m3 is there, 3 pumps running at full capacity of 120 m3 each.
Do I hvae to desmantle and rebuild the pipes?

i'll have to look into this, i've had my 8 coal generators running for hours and suddenly when i loaded up a couple days ago two of them stopped filling with water properly and crash the whole system

[Kraft51]

Originally posted by Meewec:

Originally posted by Mogges:

How can it be that you have such a drop in an infinite system, that was runnign for more than 2 weeks without any issues?

Checking the nuclear plants I have seen, that 2 of them have an "up and down" in their water consumption. You do not see a constant full vision panel, you see a fluctuation of water.
There is some bug with pipes ( I have read somewhere ), but checking all of them, maximum flow of 300 m3 is there, 3 pumps running at full capacity of 120 m3 each.
Do I hvae to desmantle and rebuild the pipes?

i'll have to look into this, i've had my 8 coal generators running for hours and suddenly when i loaded up a couple days ago two of them stopped filling with water properly and crash the whole system

post some screens of your power production, might help a lot.

[Mogges]

I assume it is a bug and nothing than doublechecking all devices helps in that matter. Another "Twilight Zone" thing is the fact, that conveyor belts disappear.......
It happend several times, that machines that are connected to belts via splitter ( because two items are fed into it ) lose one of their connection.
Just produced electromagnetic rods with 2 machines.......worked fine for days ( !! ) until I figured our this morning, that I do not have enough rods and all containers are empty. Checking the machine, one belt was gone, simply gone.
This seems to be a comparable thing with the pipes and the water. Fluctuating water supply, but 300 m3 in the pipe.....
Strange!

[Lapatong]

Originally posted by Mogges:

I assume it is a bug and nothing than doublechecking all devices helps in that matter. Another "Twilight Zone" thing is the fact, that conveyor belts disappear.......
It happend several times, that machines that are connected to belts via splitter ( because two items are fed into it ) lose one of their connection.
Just produced electromagnetic rods with 2 machines.......worked fine for days ( !! ) until I figured our this morning, that I do not have enough rods and all containers are empty. Checking the machine, one belt was gone, simply gone.
This seems to be a comparable thing with the pipes and the water. Fluctuating water supply, but 300 m3 in the pipe.....
Strange!

Pipes with air in them = bad. Pipes that flows fluids with AIR in them = Bad. Pipes with NO AIR in them but no FLOWS = good. Pipes with no AIR in them, MAX FLOWS = Efficient PIPES. Yes, Pipes = strange, sometimes. :). it also depends on what extractor did u use, probably?

[Meewec]

Originally posted by Kraft51:

Originally posted by Meewec:

i'll have to look into this, i've had my 8 coal generators running for hours and suddenly when i loaded up a couple days ago two of them stopped filling with water properly and crash the whole system

post some screens of your power production, might help a lot.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2486155666
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2486155707
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2486155734
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2486155770

i think i fixed the two that were off by deleting and re-laying pipe, but the four on the right now seem to not be getting water even though they were fine before. some pipes show full and others show fluctuating water levels throughout the entire nightmare mess

thinking i might scrap the whole setup and start over on it