Power generation conundrum

[Cougar281]

In days past, I used to love to make gobs of HV Hybrid Solar arrays that could supply crazy amounts of power with no maintenance. These days, while IC2 (and related mods) used to be my 'go to mod', since IC2 has taken the 'GregTech Lite' path (Don't get me wrong - I liked some of the things GrechTech brought to the table - the fusion reactor, IMO, was awesome), but as time went on, they went off the deep end with needless complexity and changing things that 'just worked. Now, I have onw solar array for the sole purpose of charging my nano armor. The one piece of IC2 tech I regularly use. But I digress.

Since moving to DW20 without GregTech and such, I have taken to generating all RF. My main power source for a bit now has been a steam boiler, a tree farm using eucalyptus trees, since they seem to have the highest yield, with the wood fed into a chest and processed by three redstone furnaces to make charcoal, and then fed to another chest as a buffer to hold extra charcoal for the steam boiler. The steam then runs eight MFR Steam Turbines, for a capacity of 1,280 Rf/t. For the most part, this runs things just fine, especially when I'm away for a while (I tend to get interested in something, be around for a while, then get bored and be away for a while until something else catches my interest, so relying totally on something that requires maintenance is a no-go).

When I'm active and doing things like running a large ender quarry along with the ore processing associated with it, I exceed the steam plants capacity unless I throttle the quarry a lot.

Enter Big Reactors. I had a ton of Yellorite ore hanging around, so I figured give it a shot. To be honest, compared to other reactors, I like these Big Reactors. With a 7x7x7 reactor and the (13) control rods in at 80%, I'm still making like 7k MJ/t, which is far more than I'm actually using (Yes, I over built it). I've got a simple control setup, gleaned from a post by 'LordLundar', on the reactor to keep it from running all the time that turns it on when the internal capacity drops below 10% and turns it off when it hits 90%, and while rudimentary, it seems to work just fine. Where I have the issue is the tree farm.

Enter my conundrum. I've re-vamped my power distribution so that the reactor and the tree farm feed into a (large) Vibrant Capacitor Bank, and then everything is fed from said capacitor bank. I want the reactor to be a supplementary power system, so that in times of heavy use, it can kick in and supply the extra power needed, but in low use times, such as I'm away for several weeks, the reactor does precisely nothing and the tree farm runs the show. While I haven't seen what happens when I drop to idle usage, I suspect that what will happen is it will take power from both sources equally. Or if not equally for whatever reason, it will take from both.

I played with the Ender IO Power Monitor, but unless I'm doing something really stupid, it simply doesn't work. I set it up with EnderIO redstone conduits to a torch (to test functionality) and set it to emit signal when less than 97% and stop when more than 99% full (since right now I have a 150M RF capacity in my capacitor bank and I plan on increasing it to 675M RF). The EnderIO conduits did precisely nothing. I then tried vanilla redstone. When the power level dropped below the required threshold, it (the redstone) lit up. But when it went over the 'stop' threshold, it didn't stop emitting the redstone signal. I've read people saying the PowerMonitor <> Big Reactors is buggy, but I think its more the Power monitor than the Big Reactors. If the power monitor ACTUALLY WORKED, I think it would take care of my issue perfectly. As long as the tree farm is keeping up with demand without issue, the capacitor bank will never drop below 'x'% full, thus the monitor will never send a redstone signal and the reactor will never turn on. Only when the tree farm can't keep up and the bank drops below 'x%' does the reactor fire up and help.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can keep the reactor totally off without manual intervention unless it's really needed?

 

[knn03]

I haven't touched Big Reactors for a while now but when I did play with it I used RFTool's RF Monitor block to turn the reactor on when my energy bank is less than 10% and turn it off at 90%. There's also a simpler setup using rednet cables. I can't jump in the game right now and set it up again so sorry I can't give you the specifics but you can search further on these setups or just have fun and play around.

 

[GreenZombie]

Does anyone have any ideas how I can keep the reactor totally off without manual intervention unless it's really needed?

The pro way is to use Computer Craft to monitor the capacitor bank. The even more pro way is to build turbines, and use computer craft to keep the turbines spinning at optimal revs, engage them when power is required, and manage the production of steam via the reactors control rods.

 

[MigukNamja]

I have no problems with eIO power monitors.

Your 97/99 might be too narrow. Try 75/99 ot 50/99. As for redstone cable, use eIO's own cable or Rednet.

 

[Hambeau]

Direwolf20 designed a complete Computer craft control system a few videos back and has been improving it ever since.

Here's his "Code Spotlight Reactor Control":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ZwSFVYITU

This is about a year old... The current iteration has been used in his Infinity:Evolved Skyblock series with Soaryn, using a huge reactor and 3 Turbines. (approximately episode 45). He most likely included the pastebin download codes for the newer programs.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Don't forget that the Power Monitor looks at the total power in the system, conduits included, so the difference between 97 and 99 is more than you'd think at first. So an empty capacitor might still read 1% power on the power monitor, until the conduit's drain.

Forget the power monitor though. Put two redstone ports on your reactor. One set to output signal when the reactor gets below. A certain amount, and one set to toggle it on/off. Run redstone of some kind between them. If it's below that point, the system isn't providing enough power, and the reactor fires up. Above that, there's excess and the reactor shuts down.

Alternately, build a Turbine and use a Railcraft steam boiler or three to provide power via tree farm, and the reactor only if the boilers shutdown.

 

[Inaeo]

If you're looking for completely hassle free power, the Lava powered Steam Boiler is the perfect solution. The link in my signature should provide the proof of concept.

So far as the Power Monitor goes, it sometimes gets lost, in my experience. Even when directly abutting the Capacitor Banks, the Power Monitor sometimes won't act right unless it is also connected to the network via conduits. That said, I've never had any issues with one when tied in with a conduit. The EIO Redstone Conduits work pretty well for delivering the start/stop order without leaving stray redstone signal everywhere.

 

[Someone Else 37]

Worth noting that the EIO Power Monitor looks at all the compatible machines on the energy conduit network it's connected to. It has to connect to conduits, otherwise it just won't work. Also note that you'll need to enable the "engine control" option if you want it to do the thing with two different percentages, if you haven't already.

If you still can't get it to work, then you could try another method entirely. RFTools has an energy monitor, as others have mentioned. Alternatively, if comparators work on capacitor banks, you could use one of those to (roughly) gauge the amount of RF stored. Place a line of redstone extending from it, going over a block with a redstone torch on the side and ending at one of the inputs to an RS-NOR latch (either of the vanilla variety or something from ProjectRed or the like). Feed the torch from earlier into the other input of the latch, and connect the output (whichever one turns off when the uninverted signal turns on) to your reactor's redstone port. This will do the same thing as you want out of the power monitor, but less compactly and with more granular control over when it turns on and off.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Another useful alternate option, is to plug in a single redstone conduit, so it will apply redstone to the capacitor bank. Set up the input/output on the capacitor so it'll alternate between charging and discharging when the Power Monitor swaps the signal. That'll keep it from draining completely, but might cause the machines to run dry once in a while.

 

[asb3pe]

I don't know if this solution works for you, but there are BigReactor blocks called Redstone Port and Rednet Port. They work identically, the only difference is the cable used to connect them.

I've always used Rednet Ports with MFR Rednet Cable to connect them, so that's what I'll describe here, but Redstone Ports should work exactly the same way except you use something like EnderIO Redstone Conduit.

Place two Rednet Ports anywhere on the sides of your reactor. Right click one of the ports, and drag the battery symbol into the gray box next to one of the colored boxes (I generally use the first one at the upper left, the white box, but it doesn't matter as long as you choose the same one for both Rednet Ports). After dragging the battery icon over and dropping it into the gray box, click "Commit". Now go to the other Rednet Port, select the icon for Control Rod Insertion Percentage (I forget what the actual tooltip reads, but it's something along those lines), and drop that into the same gray box as you put the battery icon into. Again, click commit. Now simply connect the two Rednet Ports with Rednet cable. That's it! You now have a 100% automated Reactor. If the power storage in the reactor reaches 100% full, then the control rods will be inserted to 100%, which basically shuts the reactor off. Or, if the reactor power storage reaches zero, then the control rods will be inserted 0%, which means the reactor will run full blast. And it works anywhere in between too - if your power storage is at 20% full, the control rods will be inserted 20% so the reactor will be working at 80% of capacity. If power storage is 90% full, then control rods will be inserted to 90%, meaning the reactor will run very slowly, not making much power (but conserving fuel).

This is the perfect way to automate a Big Reactor, as you can probably see. When the power storage is full, you don't want the reactor to run and waste your fuel. But if power storage is empty, then you want the reactor running at maximum power output, to fill the storage (and power whatever machines are running). Hopefully that might help you.

 

[Cougar281]

Thanks for the input. So I originally set up the reactor with the three redstone ports as described previously, and that 'worked', but the problem being, while I didn't end up in a position to test it, I suspect that even if the draw was within the capabilities of the tree farm powered steam system (I only had the setup going like that while the draw exceeded the tree farms capacity by at least 50%), it would take power from both, so the reactor would still fire up from time to time.

I did get the Power Monitor working, but since I didn't do anything differently between my first and second attempt (that I can think of), so I have no idea why it worked right the second time but not the first, I don't trust it. So I built the Direwolf computer system and that has been working great. And since that is watching the capacitor bank, it doesn't matter if the reactor has power in its buffer that drains out until it's empty, it won't turn on until the capacitor bank drops to 50%, so as long as the tree farm is taking care of things, the reactor will never turn on.