Combustion engine nears exploding even with water

[Ryan Child]

Hi there! I'm fairly new to these forums, and by fairly I mean i just made an account five minutes ago! XD Anyways, to my question.

I have a combustion engine running a quarry and a separate one running an oil refinery, both are running off fuel and have a constant flow of water from a pump, but for some reason, after about 20 min, the engine will turn red and near explosive. I left it going for about 2 hours earlier while i went to get lunch, and only the one running the quarry blew up on me, not the one running the oil refinery, although it had turned red when I got back. So, my question, WHY?!? Both have a complete water and fuel system, and never run out of water, but they still explode. Please help me!

[BurningCake]

Have you checked the engine's GUI to see if the water is being supplied? You might have connected it wrong. Also, you should considering using BC logic gates to make an automatic killswitch so they don't explode by random chance.

[Wendo]

depending on exactly how you set them up, they most likely DID run out of water, this can be for a number of reasons but the most common are that your pump in in a seperate chunk and thats being unloaded, or that your pipes can't carry enough water to the engine itself (gold waterproof pipes carry 4 times more water than stone)

[luigimario211]

Don't use combustion engines, no matter what you do, they still blow up. Like a ticking time bomb.

[BurningCake]

Don't use combustion engines, no matter what you do, they still blow up. Like a ticking time bomb.

Don't listen to this guy. He has no idea what he's talking about.

[efflandt]

Besides various methods to possibly keep certain chunks loaded, if allowed (Teleport Tether, World or Dimensional Anchor), you have to be certain what they actually cover and that everything you are trying to operate at the time is actually covered. A read that a Teleport Tether keeps one chunk 16x16 loaded that it is in if anyone is on the server, but if you use F9 to show a grid, does it include any of the blocks under the blue line, and which ones. Safest would be to assume inside the blue line, except a side of the chunk that also contains a Teleport Tether.

But even if you set everything up so your combustion engines seem to never overheat, server lag may occasionally result in your infinite water supply not being so infinite (water blocks not replenishing). So it is probably best to turn combustion engines off when not on the server to monitor them. For example on one server I set up a couple of 25 water filter flowers with 3 filters on each supplying power to an Energy Link to power each pump that also supplied water to 22 additional filters for 44 EU/t output from each flower. I had to expand the infinite water pool under each pump to 7x9x1 to keep each going indefinitely. But on another server I tried making the infinite water pool larger and larger and it would still lose water blocks and shut down eventually. So I gave up on that and used solar to power factories. Although, early in a game, I usually use windmills up on high ground.

If your combustion engines overheat when actually on the server looking at them, you are either overworking them, or not supplying them with enough water. I hear that it can help to use electric power from the engines (conductive pipe). I was able to run 5 fuel engines with one pump supplying water to all 5 engines, one engine with conductive pipe to the pump, and the other 4 engines with conductive pipes to MV engine generator charging MFSU (everything within 1 chunk with Teleport Tether). The MFSU is set to turn off the engines when fully charged. A 5x5x1 water pool would not sustain it, but 5x7x1 seems to work indefinitely. Piping configuration also matters, because at first 2 of the engines would eventually turn yellow because their water level was dropping dangerously low. After slightly changing the piping it seemed to be able to run indefinitely with all 5 fuel engines green, and water in them down less than half a bucket from full. But I still would not trust such a set up unattended on that other server that would lose water blocks from its not so infinite water supply to water filters.

But the minecraft auth servers are down, so I cannot grab a snapshot of that working engine setup at the moment.

[grumpygamerlp]

Combustion engines are glitchy. Server lag can make them blow up, not getting enough water, world anchors not loading chunks properly, etc... Any of these things can cause them to blow up. This is why I made this video that shows how to run engines without water safely:

By cycling two sets of engines, they never get hot enough to explode. The only other sure alternative to prevent an explosion is to babysit the engines, which defeats the purpose of automation to begin with.

p.s. I just added the link. I forgot to put it in. :)

[RyZup]

a good way to power a quarry is also energy links (sorry for going a bit off-topic)

[grumpygamerlp]

a good way to power a quarry is also energy links (sorry for going a bit off-topic)

I have a video that shows how to power a quarry with an energy link too.

[RyZup]

also I noticed that technic pack is using new transformers mod, which is more complicated (thus more enjoyable) than Energy link , and much more expensive. I hope tekkit will have it soon, since it's the real deal compared to the current mega cheap energy link.

But for now Energy Link is the safest thing to power a quarry with in tekkit.