Is there a Buildcraft Energy storage device?
- Thread starter Recon
- Start date
Yea, I just barely got around to playing both of those recently, and they are amazing. I'll never look back again
I was directly feeding power from 4 peat fired engines into a quarry ( actually 2 sets like that ), and even though that was only 4 MJ/T versus the quarry able to handle 10, there was still losses. Just switching to conduit and redstone cells I saw an improvement. You can actually watch this if you use a redstone cell right against the quarry. It'll build up MJ inside the redstone cell before outputting them because the quarry wasn't ready to use the power. With engines directly connected, that power would have been wasted.
Something to take note about the conduit, besides working wonders to help smooth out your power usage vs production, and not having looping problems...it can store a huge amount of power in each 1 pipe! So, when building a large power station then piping it out, you are building a large battery bank for any excess power..and also a buffer before your engines stop outputting power and try to explode because they have nowhere to send the power.
Many people miss the laser beam ( and I kinda do too ), but the pipe looks amazing in sphax. Not sure what it looks like without.
I was directly feeding power from 4 peat fired engines into a quarry ( actually 2 sets like that ), and even though that was only 4 MJ/T versus the quarry able to handle 10, there was still losses. Just switching to conduit and redstone cells I saw an improvement. You can actually watch this if you use a redstone cell right against the quarry. It'll build up MJ inside the redstone cell before outputting them because the quarry wasn't ready to use the power. With engines directly connected, that power would have been wasted.
Something to take note about the conduit, besides working wonders to help smooth out your power usage vs production, and not having looping problems...it can store a huge amount of power in each 1 pipe! So, when building a large power station then piping it out, you are building a large battery bank for any excess power..and also a buffer before your engines stop outputting power and try to explode because they have nowhere to send the power.
Many people miss the laser beam ( and I kinda do too ), but the pipe looks amazing in sphax. Not sure what it looks like without.
Be aware that quarries eat all the power they can, even if they don't or can't use it, the best way to control this is to use an Energy Cells settings, place it next to the quarry and set its output to 10 MJ/t or less (10MJ/t is the maximum the quarry in FTB can use, although I understand the latest releases of BC have lifted this limit somewhat).
I also use this technique to control how much power forestry machines use, as in my experience they require far less power than they demand in order to get the job done, I have large cactus and reed farms, the maximum size, and I limit the power to 1MJ/t and both farms operate perfectly.
Finally on a power management side, many BC powered machines are "always on" and using power for no reason, with Energy Conduit, you have an easy solution, just use your wrench to change the power coupling to the machine from in to out and the machine can no longer draw power.
I also use this technique to control how much power forestry machines use, as in my experience they require far less power than they demand in order to get the job done, I have large cactus and reed farms, the maximum size, and I limit the power to 1MJ/t and both farms operate perfectly.
Finally on a power management side, many BC powered machines are "always on" and using power for no reason, with Energy Conduit, you have an easy solution, just use your wrench to change the power coupling to the machine from in to out and the machine can no longer draw power.
I've actually did some simple time-testing, and found it closer to 12 MJ/t. Perhaps I didn't wait for it to become stable, but it is still a drain when it is just starting.
Quarries use up to 9 MJ/t constantly while moving, and a one-time 30 MJ to dig a block. So although constant energy use is capped at 9 MJ/t, every so often there will be short spikes whenever a block is mined. Therefore the average is probably around 10-12.
Sorry for kind of hijacking but I tried the Redstone Energy Cell and I can't seem to be able to charge it with a conduit connection. Only when an engine is directly powering it it will charge up. Output works fine but input only from direct contact with an engine. Is there something I've missed? Seems to me that all the faces are inputs and outputs, there's no orientation like IC energy storage devices.
EDIT: I figured it out! You have to right click with the wrench on a conduit that is connected to it to choose input/output. The cell itself doesn't do that.
EDIT: I figured it out! You have to right click with the wrench on a conduit that is connected to it to choose input/output. The cell itself doesn't do that.
You can use:
-Mekanism Energy Cubes(can store EU/MJ(buildcraft)/MJ(from Universal Energy)).
-Ender IO batteries(store 200k MJ I think, and if you put others next to it they form a single entity(ie 5 batteries next to each other you can input/output 1000MJ/t and have a storage of 1 million MJ).
-Mekanism Energy Cubes(can store EU/MJ(buildcraft)/MJ(from Universal Energy)).
-Ender IO batteries(store 200k MJ I think, and if you put others next to it they form a single entity(ie 5 batteries next to each other you can input/output 1000MJ/t and have a storage of 1 million MJ).
EnderIO has its Capacitor Banks for MJ storage. They're about half as powerful as Energy Cells but can fuse with each other into multiblocks. Plus there's the EnderIO conduits too.
Mekanism has Universal Cable. It requires Steel but Mek also makes steel extremely cheap. Universal Cable works on EVERYTHING: it's a built in PowerConverter that can transmit any type of power, be it EU, MJ or otherwise. For storage just hook it up to, I dunno, anything.
Mekanism has Universal Cable. It requires Steel but Mek also makes steel extremely cheap. Universal Cable works on EVERYTHING: it's a built in PowerConverter that can transmit any type of power, be it EU, MJ or otherwise. For storage just hook it up to, I dunno, anything.
Pretty much what DREVL said. Refined fuel in a steel tank is among the most dense energy storage solutions known in Minecraftia - at over 19 million MJ per block. Well, before the recent nerf. But even with that it's still almost 5 million MJ, which is considerably more than any battery from almost any mod stores. Only going via power converters into IC2 exerimental with its 40 million EU MFSU's and back would beat it. But that thing does cost you 40 diamonds, among other things.
So you should make use of the "power requested -> redstone signal" gate trigger attached to wooden pipes on engines. Each wooden pipe buffers 1,500 MJ, and any time that number falls below I think 750, the gate conditional will turn on the attached engine to try and refill the buffer, stopping when it gets back to 100%.
As a result, if you have 20 combustion engines with refined fuel set up like so, then you have 20 wooden conductive pipes storing up to 30,000 MJ for you. That MJ is instantly available to you, as if it came from a battery. But while you are in the process of consuming this energy, the engines are turning on one by one as the pipes' internal buffers drop. With all of them running, you're getting 120 MJ/t. And once you stop requesting power, they will keep running until the 30k MJ buffer is restored, then turn themselves off and stop eating fuel.
And if you have a setup where the engines never turn off, like a Railcraft boiler? Spam it with small engines. Use commercial (or even hobbyist) instead of industrial steam engines. Overload the boiler with more engines than it has output to run, so the engines run slower than they could. All this allows you to have many engines, and as a result, many wooden pipes that provide you with a big combined energy buffer.
Also so you know... Thermal expansion isn't stuck on 1.5.2, a 1.6.4 version is in the pipeline and currently being worked on
It's just moving away from being a Buildcraft add-on.
They are however making their new power system convertable to MJ and back again (Amongst other power systems) so you will later be able to use energy cells for storage still
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
AE added a battery unit; so if your powergrid goes down you won't loose item routing.
(had this happen in ult1.4.7- buildcraft grid and AE went down, IC2/GT stuff kept running on the separate grid. Very messy)
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the new BC mechanics with power pipes. Figure out how much storage you'd like and divide it by diamond or other pipe capacity. Then make pipe loops where you like. It will never explode due to the new mechanics and will have no loss. You could potentially make a giant power ring around your base even, all machines tapping from the nearest point.
I am starting to think the ingrained BC power pipe explosions will take a while to filter out of BC best practices.
I am starting to think the ingrained BC power pipe explosions will take a while to filter out of BC best practices.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the new BC mechanics with power pipes. Figure out how much storage you'd like and divide it by diamond or other pipe capacity. Then make pipe loops where you like. It will never explode due to the new mechanics and will have no loss. You could potentially make a giant power ring around your base even, all machines tapping from the nearest point.
I am starting to think the ingrained BC power pipe explosions will take a while to filter out of BC best practices.
I like this idea actually, it's quite clever :3
Gold star for you
I have tried it out and it's... iffy in practice. Maybe even buggy. Unsure how to interpretate the results correctly. But you definitely cannot just make a big coil somewhere off to the side. Energy will flow into it but won't really flow out again. And if you're building a lop on a section where a machine is requesting power, that machine will get throttled hard (regardless of whether or not additional power is flowing into the loop or not).
It seems that this might be an unintended side effect of how pipes work, and not an intended mechanic. Maybe it will work in corner cases, but my attempts to intentionally use it have not been met with much success.
It seems that this might be an unintended side effect of how pipes work, and not an intended mechanic. Maybe it will work in corner cases, but my attempts to intentionally use it have not been met with much success.