Voltage Jumping

[Xordus]

I can't figure out why there's variation in the voltage received from my power plant. I can see a small wiggle in the voltage at the source (the power plant) and that "wiggle" seems to grow the farther away I get. I thought I may have been exceeding the maximum wattage on that line, but after rewiring half of my city I can pretty confidently rule that out.

I now have a high-power wire running to a transformer with one output (the largest medium wire) running a Brick Factory and a Train Cargo Platform, that's all, and yet the platform's voltage varies so much that, at night, it loses power every couple seconds.

It's like the slightest variation I can see at the source propagates down the line, growing until it leaves something unpowered intermittently. I can't figure it out. The plant never approaches maximum output, and even though I do sell 10MW, this behavior persists when I drop that to 0.

I can't figure this out.

[Midas]

Last time my power shortage came from factories. When they get more worker, they need more power, that made black outs in parts of the city. After rewiring the high power zones, the blackouts faded away.

[3division]

Aha.. ok it may be issue that too low circuit breaker in train station.. yoi has connected it with bricks factory or some storage too ?

[Karalis Arturs]

I have a similar issue:
* Power plant full of workers and full of coal - no voltage jumps here (production not maxed though)
* Single High-Power line from power plant to a transformer near a village
* From the transformer single medium-power line (the biggest option) to the substation in the village center
* Any house in the village the voltage jumps between 150-230V

[dattway]

3dvision - yeah my train loading station is blinking also, in my case it is connected to frozen meat storage. edit: but still it is okay to load stuff, the building is working fine only voltage is dropping.

[micr0wave]

It is extremely tiresome to debug the electrical system, some overlays or so would help a ton.
What confuses me a lot are things like ... high power line -> splitter (powered) -> high power line -> splitter (suddenly without any power at all), no indication at all what could be the origin of the problem, for a gameplay where electricity has such a cruicial role there's a surprising number of tools available to look after the system (i counted zero tools so far)

[Yowst]

I made a post about it in the 'Support & Bug report' sub-forum a while ago:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/784150/discussions/1/1770385542769306345/

[Los]

You have to keep in mind that even the high powered lines have a limit of how much wattage can pass through them which is 13MW so splitting up ur high powered lines is a must and use both "Outs" from your power plant as separate lines (Dont merge them) after i learned this i had to rewire most of my grid

Also keep in mind that the medium wires have a wattage limit so if a power station is connected to multiple factories that are pulling more wattage than a single medium power line can supply you might need multiple substations

[rkelly17]

It is possible that the voltage jumping may be related to power supply issues. I have three power plants (lots of industries and houses drawing power) for my current republic and I noticed last night that I started getting the voltage jumping when one of the three was without workers and therefore not producing. As soon as I got workers in there and all three were producing again, no more voltage jumping.

[MonkeyJack_NZ]

it would be nice if i could choose what substation powers which building, sometimes buildings are in range of multiple substations.

[Yowst]

I have even have the jumping when I have more then enough power and the buildings around and don't have the issue even when they are used. Relaying power or getting it from another source or even redo the whole grid, the building stops jumoing voltages if I build a new one which doesn't have this problem. Which you never know for certain until you built it. Most of the time it's not jumping that bad but sometimes it does up to the point that it has brownout-like effects.

[Beaver]

I’m not electrically educated, but I recall that we can wire either in series or in parallel, and that wiring in series is more likely to suffer from surges. It would be useful to know from the devs if this physics is part of the design.

[TheDDGray]

try multiple substations for the same area, since the limit per substation is 2.2 MW
Also I noticed power bugs, voltage variations, for train cargo stations and farms

[Xordus]

Originally posted by Beaver:

I’m not electrically educated, but I recall that we can wire either in series or in parallel, and that wiring in series is more likely to suffer from surges. It would be useful to know from the devs if this physics is part of the design.

This was actually one of my questions as well. I thought maybe a portion of the line farther down was causing trouble with the whole line. I have parallel lines that also show jumping.

One thing I'm realizing, though, is the only buildings that have wild variation in voltage are those that pull a really small amount of power. I was wondering if their update frequency is longer due to the lower demand. idk, I'm just trying to figure this out. I've rewired a lot of stuff, I've added new substations, I've ran wires directly from the power plant. I still get voltage variation, occasionally enough to brownout buildings, and I don't know why.

[Ironclad]

The power problem I'm seeing is that a switch will show as having no power even when the switches above stream and below stream show as having power?! That feels like a bug to me.

[Dosedmonkey]

Originally posted by TheDDGray:

try multiple substations for the same area, since the limit per substation is 2.2 MW
Also I noticed power bugs, voltage variations, for train cargo stations and farms

Yes the farms do this for me. They are next to no power. Perhaps it is switching on and off of power that causes the fluctuations...?