Water Mill oddities

Hi,

I am relatively new to IC2 and we (me and friends) are currently exploring through the various (and very fun!) possibilities of IC2, especially the energy generation. During that I encountered a strange oddity about Water Mills. In short: they are not at all generating the EU described as in the Wiki and in combination generate more EU than the sum of each individual one.

My setup is as follows ( =Water, =Tin cable, =Stone block):






:Rubber Trampoline: :Rubber Trampoline:

This is one (horizontal) layer of my water works setup, between each of the (currently) 3 layers there are 2 pure water layers to have the water mills surrounded with the 3x3x3 water cube. Each layer is connected with isolated copper between the Batboxes and the top layer converts using a MV to HV and sends it to the collector. All Batboxes are set to emit power constantly (if available) and the MV-converter is hooked up with a permanent redstone torch.

The issue (each measuring has been done repeatedly to verify the results and at least over 200 ticks):
- Each water mill reports to generate 0 EU/t (as expected from the rounding down). Measured at the tin cable of a single Water Mill.
- A layer reports to generate 1.5 EU/t (but it should generate 1 EU/t). Measured right above the Batbox on the isolated copper wire of the lowest Water Mill layer.
- The entire set of 3 layers report to generate 7.25 EU/t (but it should do 3 EU/t according to the Wiki or 4.5 EU/t according to the layer measurement). Measured right above the last Batbox of the entire set of Water Mill layers.

Now while I do not complain about the extra EUs these generate, I'd really like to know whether this is a bug, an extreme measuring error on my behalf or intended?

Thanks for the answer. I will double-check my measuring later today and add a signal to the line to check how many pulses I am capturing.

The setup you described for the water mills is actually exactly how I set them up, I was just too lazy to draw the intermediate water layers.

Although I could hook up to 20 Water Mills on a single tin cable line, Batboxes are cheap to produce and provide some nice energy buffer should someone suddenly withdraw big amounts of EU from the central storage unit. In addition they ensure that more than the 0.25 EU a single Water Mill is supposed to produce travel over the line and therefore reduce the loss of EU by a good amount.

After experimenting with the water mills yesterday it seems like I just wasn't measuring long enough. As of the very low EU output, the reading stabilized at something like 1000 ticks and reported the expected values. However I encountered some other oddities:

Water Mills sometimes for no particular reason do not output energy at all
In the same setup without changing a single block, 4 water mills running on water supply that I manually added did output 0 EU. A few minutes later without me changing anything they suddenly, after consuming like 20 cans of water, started outputting their 1 EU each. I am not sure what causes these malfunctions, but those very much messed up my first readings.

Water Mills have a way too low output when running unmanned
With their 0.25 EU output maximum water mills loose already 10% of their generated EU on the first cable block, so to have them run efficiently you need to link them to a collector or transformer right away, which increases the effective production cost of water mills way beyond every other generator in the game. In addition a proper water mill setup is way more difficult to construct than a wind or solar setup, which makes them not only the most expensive (as those collectors/transformers are not optional), but as well the most inconvenient generator in the game.

I have a setup of 36 wind generators at the moment which on average output ~50 EU/t. To generate the same EU with water mills, I would have to construct about 230 of them, which would not only be way more expensive, but would required a huge amount of space as well. I rather setup a few more wind generators.

Then why wasn't I receiving any power from my 100 blocks 3x isulated iron line that transported LV?

Quote from GregoriusT

*MEGA-Facepalm* you have lost ca. 100 EU per Packet and there were only 32 EU => You were transporting -68 EU or rounded up 0 EU

Exactly. So the poster right above that statement has to be wrong, because according to what he said, I would have received the EU.

So we did some tests yesterday on cable loss and stuff. Here are the results:

Setup 1
- 40 isolated copper cables connecting 2 Batboxes
- 10,000 EU is inserted into the sending Batbox

Result:
As expected there was a strong cable loss, only 8,120 EU were received.

Setup 2
- 40 isolated copper cables connecting a chain of 11 Batboxes, no individual connection between two boxes was longer than 4 cables.
-> ...
- 10,000 EU is inserted into the sending Batbox.

Result:
All 10,000 were received at the last Batbox.

That test shows clearly that 1 EU is lost ever X blocks; a single block of cable does not loose a fraction of EU. This was further verified using 39 blocks of tin cable and a water mill.
Those tests with water mills as well make me to theorize that the lowest possible amount of EU transfered could be 1 EU, but that requires further testing.

That test shows that you can hook up water mills at up to 39 blocks of tin cable without loosing a single EU. Water mills however are still extremely buggy and do not reliably work (using 1.95b). Sometimes they work as intended, sometimes the output 0 EU while they obviously work.