Circuit Capacity with Battery Bank

[austin457]

I was having trouble with my circuits, did some experimenting and my conclusion is so illogical that I wanted to ask for confirmation.

Is it true that in a circuit with a power supply and a battery bank, the total wattage capacity is governed by the power supply not the battery bank as one would expect?

Test, using fake numbers for simplicity:

Power supply providing 50watts, into battery bank with 100 watts, circuit cap is 50 watt. Battery shows 0, power supply shows full load.

Disconnect the power supply and now the circuit cap is at the batteries' 100 watt.

I understand that programmatically electricity can be hard to implement, but this functionality is so wrong it negates even having solar panel and battery banks in the game.

Is my conclusion correct?

TIA

[theFlu]

It's been ages since I messed around with batteries, but I think you are right. IIRC, the battery bank goes from a "power source" to a "power sink" whenever you provide it power; it can't power other things while charging. It's an oversimplification, maybe, but it's not that common IRL to try to "support" batteries with a power source that doesn't have the capacity to drive the rest of the circuit.

[austin457]

Bummer. That's not how a solar panel + battery bank is supposed to work. The panel is supposed to provide a trickle charge, the batteries provide the load capacity as long as there is a charge on the batteries. Totally messed up my design. 😕

I spent all that effort to acquire solar panels, but it's pointless. Ah well.

[meganoth]

18 minutes ago, austin457 said:

Bummer. That's not how a solar panel + battery bank is supposed to work. The panel is supposed to provide a trickle charge, the batteries provide the load capacity as long as there is a charge on the batteries. Totally messed up my design. 😕

I spent all that effort to acquire solar panels, but it's pointless. Ah well.

 

I usually have a separate setup of panel->battery bank to just recharge spent batteries. Only when I have enough panels to power more than the only partly filled battery bank do I add sinks beside the battery bank. Electricity works strange in multiple ways in the game, but once you know how you can do most of the stuff you may want

 

Edited May 5, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[theFlu]

3 hours ago, austin457 said:

I spent all that effort to acquire solar panels, but it's pointless. Ah well.

Hmm.. last time I was using solar + batteries, I set up the solar power to only run on a timer (solar bank -> timer relay -> battery bank)

The small output from the solar was able to fully charge the batteries in a couple of minutes (after a 60 minute day). Just a matter of choosing a time when that specific circuit can be out of order; mine was horde base traps and lights so the morning hours were fine from 8 am or so.

[BFT2020]

4 hours ago, austin457 said:

Bummer. That's not how a solar panel + battery bank is supposed to work. The panel is supposed to provide a trickle charge, the batteries provide the load capacity as long as there is a charge on the batteries. Totally messed up my design. 😕

I spent all that effort to acquire solar panels, but it's pointless. Ah well.

 

You just need to make sure you design your circuits well.  If you want your solar panel + battery bank to run a circuit at all times, you need to make sure your total wattage from your solar banks is 5 W more than the battery bank.  That way, your batteries charge up during the day and the other devices on the circuit are powered.

 

So in your case, you either want to increase your panel output to 105W or reduce the load to 45W.  One thing to note is that based on the game today, you can't create a circuit at max battery bank capacity (300W) as the solar cells don't go that high.  In that case, I typically design it for a circuit that doesn't have items powered up during the day (for example, like theFlu mentioned, BM horde traps).  As long as you have 5W above the circuit, all batteries in the battery bank will fully charge in a day (even 6 Q6 batteries).

 

The last base I played that I got to solar panels, I believe I had 3 separate circuits running everything.  At that point, my gas need dropped considerably so less trips to mine shale.

 

Designing a solar circuit is not pointless as long as you take into consideration the limitations of the circuit itself.  Motor generators are the easiest to setup (all motors are the same quality, you get max of 300W at all times if all 6 slots are filled), but you have to deal with the constant noise and refilling of the generators.  Some people are fine with that.  Me, I prefer the solar method when I get more late game.

Edited May 5, 2022 by BFT2020 (see edit history)

[Rotor]

Dont know how relevant this is to A20, but when I first saw it, it gave me a few clues, that  I have yet to be able to test :).