Is There A Way To Shut Off The Power Flow To Pipes?

[Omicron]

In the latest version (for 1.5) and possibly earlier, wooden pipes will stop accepting energy when they have stored power. Power will then build up in the engine that feeds them.
The effect of this depends on the engine. Stirling engines will probably explode. RC steam engines will sieze up. Combustion engines will keep running, waste fuel and not explode (provided they have water).

I noticed this too on my new server. It's really convenient, because it allows you to use the internal buffer of some engines as a kind of small battery. When I just started out with a hobbyist engine and a few small machines, it wasn't uncommon for the (really long-burning) engine to produce more energy than I needed, which would then accumulate inside it and be there for me when I returned later.

 

[Cougar281]

The gates with the BC pipes are a good idea in theory, but they don't work (fast enough). I ORIGINALLY had a setup of electrical engines feeding into a redstone energy cell via gold conductive pipes, with a gate controlling the engines. I had it set to turn the engines off when the RS cell filled up, but every time pipes would blow because the setup didn't shut the engines down fast enough and the energy built up and blew. I switched to conduits and haven't used BC pipes since.

 

[danidas]

Here is a fix for your specific request.

Put a gate on the pipe connected to the quarry set to emit a redstone signal if it has work, than place a wireless transmitter next to it. Now wire the receiver to the engines so that they will only get a redstone signal and run when the quarry has work. Or you can go with the lazy route and use redstone conduits even thou conductive pipes are more efficient for short connections of under 6 blocks.

 

[immibis]

Yeah whatever. This still makes them pretty useless and I really don't understand why the author of BC is trying to get people to NOT use it's pipe on purpose.

Not sure why they're useless... now I know they won't explode any more, I'll probably use them quite a bit. They're much easier to make than redstone conduits.

Edit: that does seem to only be in the 1.5 version, so not really relevant to this thread.