Long distance Blulectricity...

[DoctorOr]

So I setup in an extreme hills biome (omg, vanilla!) in a valley between two hills. My base is (mostly) around level 70 and looking around is all hills. So I dug a "wiring closet" all the way to the top of one, which is at height 113 and setup a windmill.

Connecting the windmill to a battery, then a transformer, 10kv wire down to the base (40ish levels) another transformer and another battery box, neither of the batteries charge. Ever. The windmill definitely spins up and there is very slight fluctuation on the first battery, but it holds no charge.

Disconnecting after the first battery, and that first batter will charge full - very quickly. Reconnecting back to the transformer and it's drained almost as quick. The only thing possibly drawing the power is the other battery, but that's not charging.

Bringing the second battery up to the top and setting up the same setup with just a shorter 10kv wire, and everything charges as expected. I thought the 10kv wire was specifically available for these long haul distances. Is there any way to extend the travel ability of blulectricity? It's becoming problematic not being able to power managers, etc.

 

[Exedra]

Charge up battery's, then pump them into an enderchest. Pull them out and charge up one at your base. You should be able to automate it.

 

[Enigmius1]

From what you describe it sounds like you're losing most of your power in resistance loss on the way down to the second battery. The batteries and transformers don't really have a sense of direction; they just seek equilibrium. So you've got a windmill generating blulectricity and sending it to one battery and that battery is more or less immediately discharging that energy to the transformer, down the 10kV cable and theoretically to the second transformer and out to the second battery, but my guess is that if you were to take a reading off the 10kV cable just before the second transformer with a voltmeter, you'd be shipping very little power. Thus the second battery never receives any significant amount of power so the first battery keeps sending all it gets through the transformer and so on.

Definitely worth making yourself a voltmeter and running some tests.

 

[tedyhere]

It takes time for the power to balance out in the system..and charge up the cables, if you can get it hooked up and go into peaceful mod and go afk for a bit, come back and it should be good

 

[Captain Neckbeard]

10kV's really for "medium" distance. For really long hauls, you'll have to wait for the 1MV wires to be released, or transport BT Batteries.

 

[tedyhere]

40 blocks should be doable tho...I will test it sometime when I am not about to pass out

 

[tedyhere]

Actually just tested it and yes... 40 blocks is doable.. remember it's 10KV line so the line needs 10,000 volts going through it before you start seeing some serious charging going on. It takes a bit of time is all. I turned rain on and added 2 more wind turbines.. once it charge the cable up got rid of 2 turbines and the one turbine was still charging the batteryboxes just fine.

The electricity has a sense of direction, I tested that too, the closer to the first transformer you got the more voltage you had and the closer you got the the end transformer the less you had. It definately trickles down the line as it charges the line up

 

[Greyed]

The Capt. has it. In fact Grumm had this exact problem in DW20's S2 SMP. Elo was on the server at the time and gave the same explanation.

 

[MilConDoin]

Have a look at http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/a-players-guide-to-redpower-2-blutricity.6363/

 

[DoctorOr]

Have a look at http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/a-players-guide-to-redpower-2-blutricity.6363/

Thanks for the link, and everybody else's replies. I knew blutricity was based off actual electricity and I'm quite familiar with that. However that brought along some assumptions about distance, and 40 meters is a trivial distance in "real life electricity", particularly with cabling designed for it. For example, your local power company more than likely has thousands of *miles* running power somewhere between 120-130kV

I can build more windmills easily enough though.

 

[Evil Hamster]

Yes, but in "real life" we have better insulation than wool

 

[Celestialphoenix]

Yes, but in "real life" we have better insulation than wool

What insulation?

 

[nevakanezah]

Trufax: the power lines you see do not have any insulation, as the additional weight and cost inherent would be unfeasible.

 

[Captain Neckbeard]

Okay, while we're on this, I'll just say as an electrician that distance is the best and oftentimes the cheapest insulation.

 

[Poppycocks]

Turns out that the rules for bluectricity are really rather hardcore, consider this build:

And now try and guess how much electricity it's producing. You are correct, none at all.

 

[Omicron]

I doubt that it's not producing anything. How long has this been running? And have you taken a voltmeter to the windmills themselves?

Every piece of 10 kV wire needs to store up to around 60 kJ in itself in order to get its voltage up. It's called self-capacitance and is a "feature" of real electricity conductors as well (though Eloraam said she had to use very high self capacitance to avoid murdering the server tick rate). With a battery box clocking in at 300 kJ, what you are looking at is basically "for every 5-6 of these 10 kV wires, you need to dump a full battery box worth of energy into them before they're ready to do work for you". DoctorOr's 40 blocks, for example, would consume 8 full battery boxes worth of energy until they start conducting properly. From your screenshot, you look like you're using way more than just 40 wires.

After that initial chargeup, by the way, the wires work perfectly fine, and won't behave any different from normal blue alloy wires aside from being much more stable against charge fluctuations when you add new components (precisely because of the huge charge they hold).

And 10kV is definitely usable for long-ish distances. I measured a voltage drop of just 1% over a line of 100 wires while running 3 blulectric furnaces constantly. You can send a lot of power through this stuff. Of course, 1 MV wire will be even better, but also probably require even more of a self-charge. We'll see when it gets added.

 

[Poppycocks]

Neah man, it's not visible (very much) but there's a battery station at the foot of the hill. It was full of energy from the nearby solars when I was connecting the mills up. Most of the bateries emptied out into the cables, but the amperes kept going down further from the station. The cable which was connecting the jacketed wire to the kinetic generator was showing less 0.00A. For some reason the windmills kept going in slow motion, as if they had nothing to power, so I guess that that was the problem, I just can't understand why it happened.

 

[Omicron]

Then maybe there's no connection between the transformer and the jacketed wire, or somewhere else. If the jacketed wire shows both 0 V and 0 A, it's not connected to the windmill, because the windmill would charge it to 100V before throttling itself.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

And now try and guess how much electricity it's producing. You are correct, none at all.

It doesnt matter how much it makes when it looks that awesome

 

[Golrith]

Turns out that the rules for bluectricity are really rather hardcore, consider this build: And now try and guess how much electricity it's producing. You are correct, none at all.

Looks good though! Nice design