Getting My People Enough Water

[jeff.oster03]

I'm having a heck of a time getting my people enough water once I pass a population of 1000. I'm playing on realistic mode, and have an intake pipe at a lake that goes to a large water treatment plant. I shuttle workers to it constantly and keep it stocked with chemicals. That attaches to a large water pump with large water pipes, and from that I have medium water pipes leading to various water substations. The water substations are in the middle of my city, attached to all my apartment buildings and schools and whatnot. They can't stay filled... the water pumps right through to the buildings, and it isn't enough. My population is only 1250.

Best I can tell, I should have built even more substations that overlap each other? But it seems 1 large water treatment facility just doesn't treat and pump enough water for everyone I guess? This seems really unbalanced for the game, anyone else having this problem?

[bajecznie nawdychany]

No pump between water source and water treatment plant? I think that is the reason.

[Silent_Shadow]

Even the small water treatment plant should be enough for over 10,000 citizens, but only if it gets enough water. Since you're struggling with 1,250 citizens, you likely have a bottleneck in flow somewhere in your water network, so check the tanks of all the water buildings/infrastructure; the bottleneck will be between an empty tank and a full one.

[jeff.oster03]

Originally posted by bajecznie nawdychany:

No pump between water source and water treatment plant? I think that is the reason.

Yes, I have a water pump between the source and the treatment center.

[Delle(DK)]

it need to be setup like this
i always use big pipes even for the small pumps

Water source - pump - water treatment - pump - city
or
water source - pump - water treatment - pump - water tower - city

I have a 2000 people city and an industry 700m away and im pumping water uphill to the industry area. My water cleaning building only operate at like 10% capacity, so it sound like there is an issue of some kind with your system
And the water treatment only have like 3 people there.
A pro tip.. the small water well require 0 people so its ideal to possition outside your city to send water to the cleaning building it only need power :)

( my own setup...
small water well - small pump - water cleaning - small pump - water tower - city
My city run on one water pipe, and my industry area run on another.
And to the industry area there are 2 small pumps along the way.

In my previous game i also had a water bottle neck. The issue turn out to be that i direclty after the water cleaning build had placed an underground tank like this
- water cleaning - underground tank - pump - industry
This turn out to be a bottle neck and once i destroyed the undegorund tank then everything started to work normal.
So my guess is you maybe have such a problem you need pumps somewhere in your network.

example
water source - pump - cleaning - pump - city. Normaly you dont need any pumps other places but you can add a pump in middle of the city or something to increase water presure over long distances.

[High King Lemur]

Two things to note here:
- Surface water outflow provides water with quality around 70%. That means that after water treatment you'll only get 70% of the input water amount. The rest is dumped as sewage.
- Small water pump has throughput of around 55 m^3. If that's a limiting factor, replace it with big water pump.

[lumpmeister3]

you should look into small wells roughly 5 supplying 2 big pumps 1 big water treatment 2 big pumps 2 water towers for a buffer then take it to switches then take it out to where its needed

[woodb3kmaster]

The main cause of your bottleneck is water quality. As Lord Metzgermeister pointed out, surface water intakes only supply water at a maximum of 77% quality. The speed at which water treatment plants produce clean water (and their rate of chemicals consumption) depends on the difference between the input water's quality and the target output quality. Even if you set the target water quality to the bare minimum for drinking without any complaints (97%), your treatment plant will still need to raise the quality by 20%. That big of an increase takes a lot longer to achieve than the 3-5% increase needed to treat water from a well, so your treatment plant will produce clean water at a much lower rate than if you were to use wells, even when fully staffed.

It's also worth pointing out (as Lord Metzgermeister did, again) that the throughput of a small water pump is quite a bit lower than the capacity of a large pipe - roughly 55 m³ vs. 127 m³. A large pump's capacity is much closer, so it'll be much less of a bottleneck, if any. There's at least one guide on Steam that covers the water system in much greater detail, and I highly recommend reading it.

[jeff.oster03]

Thanks to everyone who commented! I figured out my problem: one of my large water pumps didn't have power, so the water was just trickling through from the pump upstream. I just gave it power and now I have no issues. Thanks!