Water Strainer

The Water Strainer is a block that's part of the Power Converters mod. It is an advanced machine.

Water Strainer
The Water Strainer is an upgraded version of the Water Mill. Instead of placing water buckets inside of the strainer, you can pump water, making it an automatic and easy process.

Video Tutorial
The following video shows you how to craft the water strainer and generate power from it!

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Usage
To use the Strainer, simply put a Pump over one of the corners of a 3x3 square of water and attach some Cobblestone Waterproof Pipe to the strainer. Put some cables (Tin Cable is best to minimize energy loss, because they only generate 2 EU/t) into a Storage Unit.

Water Power Station
Through testing it has been discovered that 1 pump can supply a large number of water strainers reliably. To do so requires the placement of Water Strainers at the "end" of a waterproof pipe to sucking overly large amounts of water out of the pipe. Testing has demonstrated that 64+ water-strainers can be powered from one pump with a steam engine (or equivalent of). This picture demonstrates one possible inefficient method of maximising the water from one pump.

Hydro Flowers


Perhaps the most efficient usage of the Water Strainer. Make a 5x5 pool of water with a pump above the center. Attatch a golden waterproof pipe on 3 sides and the top and connect a water strainer to every possible place. Wire all of them up with glass fibre cable. Now, supply the pump with some power for about a minute to kick start it. After it has a little power to start with, wire it to an energy link, then connect a wooden conductive to that and a golden conductive to the pump on the empty face. In testing, a single low voltage solar will power the pump enough to constantly feed each strainer, so about 8 EU/t is neccesary to keep the system running. You can add more and more modules together. (Remember, each pump needs its own pool) All of them can be powered from one Energy Link. A simple method of routing is an MFSU on the cable that the Energy Link is attached to. This will give half to the MFSU and half to the Energy Link. Splitters can be used to better route out power.

Compact, Self-Sufficient Hydro Pyrami2012-09-19_23.15.22.png
Generates ~48 EU/t, uses only common materials, and will completely fill a Batbox in around 40 seconds once it's running. Fits in a 7x7x3 area and can be easily sunk undergroud to provide a constant and unobtrustive source of zero-maintenance EU, very useful early-game. Similar in construction to the Hydro Flower above, but not reliant on solar energy, or conductive piping and uses Ultra-Low-Current cables in place of Glass Fibre.

Second picture shows the construction with the top layer removed, exposing the internal workings. 3x3 pool of water with a pump (Buildcraft) in the middle, 2 x Golden Waterproof Pipes attached to each face with an Energy Link on top. Water Strainers are then attached to every exposed section of Pipe and cabled together using Ultra-Low-Current cables to output the power to (in this example) a Batbox for storage. Once running, the four Water Strainers immediately adjacent to the Energy Link provide the pump power.

Important Note: This design will NOT function immediately on construction. It will only become self-sufficient once the Water Strainers are already producing power, so you will need to kick-start it by supplying the Energy Link with a tiny amount of temporary EU once the lower layer is built and the four Water Strainers placed next to the Energy Link. A Generator and a piece of Charcoal or a few seconds from a single Solar Panel is more than enough.

Once the lights on the Water Strainers turn green, you can remove your Generator/Solar Panel and the Pyramid is good to go.

Bugs
When testing EU/t output with an EU-Meter, you will get very dodgy readouts. It is best to test wires coming out of a BatBox or directly test each water strainer. Using the EU-Meter on anything else will give false readings.

Should any liquid but water enter a water strainer through a waterproof pipe, the result will corrupt a singleplayer world or crash a server. The corruption can only be fixed by using a map editor to remove the water strainer or by deleting the Power Converters mod. However if there is more pipe directly opposite the input pipe, the other liquids (oil,lava) will continue through the opposite side; this makes them very useful for use in ocean/lake based oil wells.