Water Mills not Working?

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SeaStrudel

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Jul 29, 2019
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I am using water mills to partly power my electrical engines for my automatic tree farm. I am also using solar panels but the water mills is mostly for the night. I have a pool with about 15-20 water mills in it. I am using tin cable and a really small amount of copper cable. The water mills are not producing any power for some reason, so please help. Here are some screenshots (The water mills are connected to the batbox from the back side). http://imgur.com/MLajKKg
http://imgur.com/eRNO88S
http://imgur.com/2rKDFo9
Thanks in advance :)
 

Peppe

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Jul 29, 2019
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Run upto 39 blocks of tin cable. Connect all of your water mills to this tin cable. Max length from any watermill to the end of the cable needs to be 39 blocks.
For tin the 40th block of tin cable it will remove 1 EU from any packet traveling past that point. Water mills make 1 EU or less per packet they send, so if your whole run is tin it will wipe out any power output if the distance is 40 blocks or more.

At your 40th block or earlier put the batbox. The batbox will pool all the small watermill packets together and store them. On the output side of the batbox use copper cable if early game -- late game glass fibre is typically better. The batbox will send out 32 EU packets to any machine that requests power from it. On copper cable every fifth block the packet will be reduced 1 eu. So if you have a run of 10 blocks from your batbox to your electric engine you will send 32 EU out and the engine will receive 30.

If you use glass fibre cable you lose 1 EU per packet every 40 blocks. Early game or short runs from the last power source copper works fine. Long runs or late game glass fibre will be your primary cable.
 

SeaStrudel

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Jul 29, 2019
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So basically just put the batbox on the 39th block with tin cable and then on the output for the batbox put copper cable and run the copper cable to the electrical engine?
 

Saice

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Jul 29, 2019
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the thing to take away here that when dealing with EU loss is per packet. So you can help deal with it by both adding some sort of buffer before the loss point (In this case batbox before going over 40 blocks.) and by combining smaller packets into large ones (also handled by the batbox in this case).
 

zemerick

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Jul 29, 2019
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Are you adding some sort of water container to the watermills?

Watermills with just water around them produce an incredibly tiny amount of power. 0.01 Eu/t for each block of water touching the watermill. Absolute max is .25 EU/t per watermill ( 3x3x3 is 27, 1 block is the watermill and 1 is a cable to get the power out for 25 blocks. )

If you are not adding water to the watermill, you are at absolute best producing the same amount of power as 1 electrical engine uses. 20 watermills producing a perfect 0.25 eu/t each is 5 eu/t. An electrical engine uses 6 eu/t unless you add a circuit board with an iron electron tube, then it will use 5eu/t.

If you have multiple engines, and you don't have a perfect setup for the watermills, and you dont have the engines upgraded...you could be quite a bit lower than the power you need.

If set up a method to add water buckets to the watermills, that will get you 1eu/t for each watermill. Water cells will get you 2eu/t but you lose the cell.
 

SeaStrudel

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Jul 29, 2019
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Are you adding some sort of water container to the watermills?

Watermills with just water around them produce an incredibly tiny amount of power. 0.01 Eu/t for each block of water touching the watermill. Absolute max is .25 EU/t per watermill ( 3x3x3 is 27, 1 block is the watermill and 1 is a cable to get the power out for 25 blocks. )

If you are not adding water to the watermill, you are at absolute best producing the same amount of power as 1 electrical engine uses. 20 watermills producing a perfect 0.25 eu/t each is 5 eu/t. An electrical engine uses 6 eu/t unless you add a circuit board with an iron electron tube, then it will use 5eu/t.

If you have multiple engines, and you don't have a perfect setup for the watermills, and you dont have the engines upgraded...you could be quite a bit lower than the power you need.

If set up a method to add water buckets to the watermills, that will get you 1eu/t for each watermill. Water cells will get you 2eu/t but you lose the cell.
No, but I might add way more water mills, like 25-50 more. I'm sure that would be a lot of tin but I think it would be a good pay off considering right now I have about 20. I would add water to them but that would be pretty hard to automate I would assume. What do you think I should do?
 

zemerick

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Jul 29, 2019
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Honestly....find another source of power. Warermills are pretty poor if you don't feed them water.

There are a lot of options. Considering you don't want to create an automated system you could run a generator off of scaffolds. You could also run solar panels.

Generator puts out 10 eu/t and solars put out 1 eu/t. You can then upgrade the solars to 8, 128, and 512 eu/t. Depending on your modpack those advanced solars can get 1/8 their normal power during the night. If you have Mystcraft, an eternal day no weather age works great with solars.

Just to give you a bit of an idea of how poor those watermills are: If you don't quite have them optimized ( very likely due to the limited length of cables ), you are looking at something more like .2 eu/t. To run just 3 electrical engines you would need 18eu/t. This would take 90 watermills. That's a lot, and it would only get you a pitiful 6 MJ/t. Just 4 hobbyist steam engines would put out more power, and they use very very little coal once they have warmed up.

Windmills are pretty much the same without constant storms.
 

SeaStrudel

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Jul 29, 2019
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Honestly....find another source of power. Warermills are pretty poor if you don't feed them water.

There are a lot of options. Considering you don't want to create an automated system you could run a generator off of scaffolds. You could also run solar panels.

Generator puts out 10 eu/t and solars put out 1 eu/t. You can then upgrade the solars to 8, 128, and 512 eu/t. Depending on your modpack those advanced solars can get 1/8 their normal power during the night. If you have Mystcraft, an eternal day no weather age works great with solars.

Just to give you a bit of an idea of how poor those watermills are: If you don't quite have them optimized ( very likely due to the limited length of cables ), you are looking at something more like .2 eu/t. To run just 3 electrical engines you would need 18eu/t. This would take 90 watermills. That's a lot, and it would only get you a pitiful 6 MJ/t. Just 4 hobbyist steam engines would put out more power, and they use very very little coal once they have warmed up.

Windmills are pretty much the same without constant storms.
I'm running the Direwolf pack but I added advanced solars. I am going with biomass for my main source of power so that's why I have the automated tree farm. I have the 20 water mills and 5 regular solar panels for the farm as of right now. Maybe I can figure out someway of creating the biomass and then having a bio generator pumping the biomass directly into it and then taking the EU and putting it in the batbox, but then the biomass thing wouldn't work as I would be using all of my saplings for creating the biomass for the farm and not for my actual EU production. So pretty much I'm stumped lol.
 

Peppe

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Jul 29, 2019
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For MJ power biomass runs very well on biomass engines.

For EU there is a biomass generator, but it is very poor compared to the engine. Much better to use biomass engines and power a magma crucible converting either netherack or cobble stone to lava. Then burn the lava in a geothermal generator for EU.

Unless you already have a lot of EU production avoid using electrical engines. There are no good conversions ratios for EU to MJ. MJ to EU has lava, but most other methods are poor.
 

brujon

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Jul 29, 2019
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In FTB, it's easy to use Watermills as a cheap source of EU early game. You can use the Aqueous Accumulator from Thermal Expansion in order to produce infinite water from 2 water source blocks placed on it's side. You then set up pneumatic tubes throughout the watermill farm, making a loop such that one end of the pneumatic network connects to the retriever, and the other end on a filter. Set the filter up so that it requests empty buckets from the tube network and feeds them into the Aqueous Accumulator, and the output feeding into a Filter requesting Water Buckets. Since you said you already have a lot of Tin, you can use the alternate bucket recipe to craft buckets out of Tin in the same pattern as using Iron, and make each watermill output 1EU/t instead of 0,25EU/t. You might want to use buildcraft tanks as a water "buffer" because a single accumulator might not be able to keep up with a lot of Watermills running simultaneously. All of this uses only Tin, Copper & Redstone for the most part.

You said you have 20 watermills, so that's 20EU/t. Converted with an unupgraded Electrical Engine, you'd be pulling in about 7MJ/t for your farm. You'll spend about the same amount of Tin to set up this system that you would for adding more Watermills to the system, but you'll get far better returns out of your investment. 3 tin per bucket, per Watermill, plus 1 for the filter and 1 for the retriever, means 66 tin, or just over a stack of Tin. Plus whatever Tin you'll have to use to make Brass for the Pneumatic tubes, 2 Gold for the Filter, 2 ender pearl for the retriever (which you can get out of 4 iron using Minium Stone). A bit more resources in the way of setting up the production line for this, but nothing really too fancy.

Once you're ready to be weaned out of your Watermills, you can disassemble the pneumatic tube network and rework it into something else. For example, the Filter/Retriever set up in conjunction with a Buildcraft Pump in the Nether and an Ender Chest can be used to pump infinite lava to a network of Geothermals.

That being said...

Watermills are some of the most godawful EU generation engines in the game. And they cost 4,5 iron a piece to make. If you use Gregtech, i'd just recycle all 20 back into 10 generators and quest for rubber and copper while making do with burning wood/coal in order to power stuff, until you can turn them into Solars or Geothermals. Seriously, they're bad. The only thing worse are Windmills. Windmills are bad unless you're playing in Skyblock or have a floating castle or something, in which case they are more or less OK for early game power generation. Energy loss over the distances required for placing a Windmill where it will generate useful power (147 blocks according to wiki), is too high. To go from 147 to 64, you'd be looking at 39 tin cable for 1EU loss, then batbox, plus another 8EU loss over the remaining 43 copper cables. Just to break even, you'd need fiveish Windmills.

What i usually do is i skip the whole early game EU generation, instead going for Thermal Expansion & Forestry ones, getting a Quarry set up, and then get the ball rolling on resources and jump straight for Magma Crucibles into Geothermals for 1MJ to 1EU conversion ratio, or Nether pump for even better "convertion" ratios.

If you're looking for best MJ production in early game, Thermal Expansion/Railcraft is the way to go. Railcraft also has the benefit of having the best late game MJ generation as well, with Steam Boilers. There is no best early game EU production. It only gets good after Geothermals, unfortunately...