Hydro Dam completely stops flow

[Proconsul87]

I just built a hydro dam in a river with a good flow, the water started building up behind it as expected. Then I noticed 0 power was being produced and I started to notice the pollution in the water started drifting up river. I check and noticed the flow had completely stopped around the damn and further down the river the water had reversed direction. Is it that the source water for the map is procedurally generated at a certain height and my dam actually backed the water up above that?

Cheers,

 

[MGB]

I'm having problems with DAMs too, I had a great spot with 1600w power, built the dam but no matter what I do (even built it in the reverse direction thinking I'd screwed it up), it never reports any power being generated. The water flows change as well, but this could be intentional?

 

[Myziot]

+1

I have the same problem whereby the water build up, but the it say's "not operating" and generates 0 MW.

 

[DaBiggy]

There was a Thread earlier today, where I tried posting an explanation. However, my posting never showed up, so I'm not sure whats up with this.

Link

The Problem right now is, I think, the following: The fill height HAS to be below the height of the water source. The Dev in that thread said, that the Dam has to be filled up to a certain fill height to be operational.
If the level of the water source is below the fill height, the Dam will never completly fill. And only a completely filled dam will let water through.

I have furthermore gotten the impression, that the electric output is more dependent on the water pressure (size of the arrows) than the actual fill height of the dam. This contradicts the tooltip.

Quickfix for now: Build the dams as low as possible to generate a maximum flow in the river.

 

[mironos]

Same here. Tried placing it at varying heights/angles locations on two different branches of a river, and always got the same result -- water stopped an eventually reversed w/ 0 power.

The arrows representing water flow at those spots seemed to be good (I don't know how big they can get).

Maybe there's just not a strong enough river on my map, but it would be nice if there would be some sort of indication of whether a dam will work or not -- trial and error at $200K+ isn't really a good option.

 

[Proconsul87]

Damn ya I was getting the impression it might have something to do with the height the water was being generated at. That's too bad about the way it's calculated too cause a real dam's power is based on the height (higher the water level, the higher the pressure and thus flow rate through the dam). It's frustrating I strategically picked the deepest canyon I could find to make the dam and that's actually what makes it not work...