Buildings getting no heat

[boltentoke]

Not sure what happened this winter, my city is getting no heat. Heat plant is running and its hot water tank is full. Just built a bigger Heat exchanger in the city and is all connected up with 47% Total Capacity and 24% Estimated Max Drain (still not sure exactly what these mean, the smaller one was still under 100% on both marks but was having heating issues still with "too many connections"). Last winter was fine, no heating issues. But this winter start out okay but buildings quickly stopped getting heat for some reason, I can't figure out why. Is it an electricity issue?

Save file here, https://filebin.net/hp2mkerve21dlntt

[Greybeard]

So there's a couple of issues with your setup. You might have just been lucky in previous winters.
1. You're connecting small heating pipes with a big heat exchanger. They'll not be able to bring it to max temperature
2. A large chunk of your pipe is overground and very long, which loses you more heat.
3. Most importantly: You don't consistently have workers in the heating plant. So the temperature will drop when nobody's around and only increase marginally when it's staffed.

Hope that gives you some pointers

[kyonkun]

Your small heat plant is almost 1.5 km from the exchanger and you're using one single (above ground) small pipe to try to heat the entire city. And the heat plant shuts off sometimes due to workers or coal, I didn't care enough to check.
The simplest answer is to build another small heat plant closer to the city. If it needs a pumping station between it and the exchanger it's definitely too far away. You could also run another pipe from the extant heat plant to another exchanger in the city (just use a small one, a small pipe can't support a large exchanger). You also need to make sure your heat plant is getting a steady supply of coal and workers, which would be made easier if it was closer to the city.
It probably worked last year because the heat exchanger was supporting fewer buildings/citizens.

[boltentoke]

Originally posted by Greybeard:

So there's a couple of issues with your setup. You might have just been lucky in previous winters.
1. You're connecting small heating pipes with a big heat exchanger. They'll not be able to bring it to max temperature
2. A large chunk of your pipe is overground and very long, which loses you more heat.
3. Most importantly: You don't consistently have workers in the heating plant. So the temperature will drop when nobody's around and only increase marginally when it's staffed.

Hope that gives you some pointers

Ok thanks. That makes sense. So I guess I should:
1. Replacing the pipe with a larger pipe to match the exchanger. Previous winters had a small heat exchanger and didn't have as many issues.
2. Use all underground piping for the replacement.
3. I constantly watch the heating plant to make sure it's getting enough workers. I make sure there are enough buses running and spaced out so that when the 7 workers leave, 7 new ones aren't too far behind. If not I adjusted the buses. It occasionally shuts off, but unless there is something else I should be watching for, the heating plant's Heat Water Tank is always full so I figured this was not an issue.

Originally posted by kyonkun:

Your small heat plant is almost 1.5 km from the exchanger and you're using one single (above ground) small pipe to try to heat the entire city. And the heat plant shuts off sometimes due to workers or coal, I didn't care enough to check.
The simplest answer is to build another small heat plant closer to the city. If it needs a pumping station between it and the exchanger it's definitely too far away. You could also run another pipe from the extant heat plant to another exchanger in the city (just use a small one, a small pipe can't support a large exchanger). You also need to make sure your heat plant is getting a steady supply of coal and workers, which would be made easier if it was closer to the city.
It probably worked last year because the heat exchanger was supporting fewer buildings/citizens.

The heat plant shuts off due to workers, but as long as the Heat Water Tank remains full this shouldn't be the issue right? I kept the heating plant out of the city for pollution reasons. How can I fix it without building one closer? Just replace the pipes with large underground ones?

[Silent_Shadow]

The "heat water tank" volume is just a metric for how much demand the plant can handle, which should be more than the sum of the tank volumes of the buildings that it heats, especially if the plant is far away or if you use long stretches of above ground piping. Each building needs so much heating depending on its volume, which is represented by its tank volume size. Buildings (including the heating plant) will not instantly lose all of their heat without a working heating plant, but rather they will drift down to the ambient temperature.

Generally you should use underground pipes for long distance connections from the heating plant, as this will enable the plant to heat more buildings at the connected heat exchanger and use less coal (or waste). You should also avoid placing buildings at the edge of the heat exchanger's connection range, as a not insignificant amount of heat seems to be lost along the final stretch from the heat exchanger to these buildings (these buildings will also become cold before others). Above ground piping is okay for short sections or if you need a heating pipe built quickly and don't care about a reduced heating capacity nor some extra coal being burned for fewer buildings.

You can either wait for the end of winter to replace the long distance heating pipe with an underground one, or you can build the underground pipe next to the above ground pipe from the heating plant (you probably have extra unused heating pipe connection points at the plant) up to just before where it connects to the heat exchanger (or pumping station); then once it is built, you can snip off the end of the above ground pipe and build the last ~10m or so of underground piping to the heat exchanger or pump station. You might need a short above ground pipe section to transition from under the ground to the connection points for heating plants, pumping stations, and heat exchangers though.

If you have pollution enabled, then do not build the larger heating plant closer than 1 km or the small heating plant closer than 700m, or else you'll have death waves in winter where the pollution will reach your citizen's homes when the plant is operating at 100% and start lowering their health and lifespans.

If you have staffing issues, you can build a bus station near the heating plant and force off extra workers at the station so that they can fill in any jobs that empty shortly after the bus leaves. Just ensure that you have two consecutive stops at the station; one to drop off workers (so they can immediately fill empty jobs) and the next one where workers are forced off (so extra workers can fill empty jobs a little bit later). Ideally you would also increase the frequency workers are dropped off at with more vans or even cars rather than buses, so as to reduce the chance of the plant not having workers but without throwing excessive number of workers at the plant (and thus wasting their work shifts with unemployment).