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According to the Feed the Beast Wiki article, Electrical Engines take 6 EU/t and output 2 MJ/t. Since I'm powering a forestry machine outside of my main power station, I wanted to use efficient cabling to transfer power to the engines. So I thought I'd use Tin Cable because it's much cheaper than Glass Fibre Cable. However, Tin Cable can only withstand 5 EU/t; no problem, just upgrade my Electrical Engines with a Small Curcuit Board containing an Iron Electron Tube, which reduces the power required by 1 EU/t.

So I built two Electric Engines, and gave them both a Small Curcuit Board upgrade with Iron Electron Tube. I connected them to a Logger and Arboretum, and then wired up some Tin Cable from an LV transformer pulling off of my main power storage. As soon as I placed the last cable, the whole cable exploded and disappeared! Isn't the EU/t based on what is being requested on the far end, which should be 5 EU/t? Why can't I use Tin Cable in this situation?

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The LV Transformer outputs 32 eu/packet which causes the cable to explode. It doesn't matter how much is requested as the EU network deals in packets.

All machines that run on EU have a certain packet size they can accept or output. This is independent of what is doing the accepting.

Tin cables are only meant to collect the output from low tier generators (like solars and water mills) into a aggregator which transforms it into a higher setup of energy.

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  • Internet points for beating me. Damn ninjas.
    – a cat
    Commented Feb 16, 2013 at 3:41
  • To address the difficulty that "you can't" now poses to the asker, a solution is to use copper cables and either eat the EU loss, or to limit your copper cable lengths to 5 by putting LV transformers every 6th block (which relay incoming LV packets intact since no transforming is needed, and are cheaper than using batboxes as relays).
    – SevenSidedDie
    Commented Feb 16, 2013 at 18:50
  • +1 Thanks, that makes sense! I think what threw me off is that the Electrical Engine only consumes the power it needs, which is unique because no other machine works this way: "You can connect it to any voltage without causing it to explode, and will not take the maximum available output per tick." But as you've explained, that doesn't stop the output itself from being 32 EU/packet. Hmm, maybe I'll update the wiki so it's less confusing for the next guy :)
    – mellamokb
    Commented Feb 27, 2013 at 22:16
  • @mellamokbtheWise the FTB wiki isn't editable for the public you'll have to PM the wiki team on their forum for that.
    – ratchet freak
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 2:14
  • @ratchetfreak: I have a confirmed account so I made the change - don't you see my additional comment "However, you still have to use the correct cable type to handle the maximum output packet size from the source or your cable will explode."
    – mellamokb
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 5:14

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