Power consumption on idle factory

Question

Maybe it's a bug, maybe not.

When everything on my factory is standing still (because of full storage)... I mean, really everything... no miner, no oil pump, etc... my power grid tells me, that I still have a power consumption of 9MW. All my generators are off also, since I mainly use the thermal generators. These are running (they always run) but they aren't consuming any power. I can say that, because I have them all stuck together to one powerline. It's my factory which consumes some kind of a standby power. Any ideas? Is this really standby power? Or a bug?

Comments

Sorry, but no. There is no truck station in my factory. I do not use truck routes.

It's not a mega factory so I have everything in pretty good overview. I actually cut off one of my three factory complexes for testing. The power consumption did go down from 9MW to 6MW for the rest of the network. And I can definitely say that absolutely nothing is running on that complex.

I assume that this effect only occurs, when on thermal generator power. Because they run always on full power anyway. If this also would happen, using cole, oil or bio power, someone would have recognized it already, since this would mean, that these generators are running all the time, even if everything else is on idle.

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Hey

My factory use around 10 000MW at normal operation.
Now my storage is full and I expect the same bahavour with 1200 1300 MW of consuption.

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Tell me, when you found out....

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I just found this :

Radar tower at build = 30MW
Jelly pad = 5MW
Jump pad = 5MW

I've got 1632 MW used at idle out of my 44250 MW max.
40 Tower / 1 Jelly / 5 jump pad = 1230 MW

Missing another 402 MW...

Searching for it !

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EDIT : I just found that idle factories are eating a small amount of enery.
For exemple :  20 x Assembler = 2 MW

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40 radar towers thats crazy!  I built 5 on the 5 absolute highest points around the map and they cover every square inch of the map.

Answer 1

So after some tests, it seems idle machines are using 0.1 MW of power even with no belts plugged in it.

Radar tower = 30MW

Jelly pad = 5MW

Jump pad = 5MW

Idle machine = 0.1MW

Comments

Hey Penta,

nice research!

I don't have a tower in use (it is there but not connected to a powerline). By the way: Why do you have 40 towers? Just as an info: you can do the scanning of the whole map with just one tower, if it is high enough. Just as a suggestion for you to safe power for other things.

 I don't own any jump or jelly pads. Never saw the need for that (if you have a jetpack).

So I think too that the idle machines use some power. I tried the following - just for science reasons: disconnect  one of my factory parts. My idle consumption in the rest of the power net went down from 9 to 6 MW. I connected it again and it went up to 9 MW again. Then I manually switched off every machine in that factory part (the button at the machine). This had no effect at all - still 9 MW.

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Hey,

Tower are simple way to identify on may where I've got some electricity.
By the way, I really don't care about 1000 MW consumption because my factory can produce up to 45 GW

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Hi there, old thread, I know. But I'm ocd and would like to know about things. I made some further testing and now, I'm assuming that 0,095 to 0,1 as an average standby powerconsumoption could be right.
But messing around with different parts of my factory the number still can't be correct. Now I have the theory that every machine consumes different standby power.
For instance a generator conumses no standby power at all. A constructor consumes less standby power than a mk3 miner or a manufacturer. I think it depends on the 100% power they use. If only someone finds the formula for that...

Answer 2

I can concur that an idle machine still consumes power.
I isolated a small portion of my network: 2 Geothermal Generators, 4 Oil Pumps and 1 Miner Mk 2. Everything is idle, yet when I check the grid on one of the Power Poles, it says 400 MW produced and 1 MW consumed. The moment I disconnect 1 of the Oil Pumps, then the consumption goes down to 0. So 0.1 MW per machine when idle would make sense here: I have 5 machines, 5 x 0.1 = 0.5 which rounds off to 1. Disconnect one machine then I have 0.4 MW which rounds off to 0.