Need help with Steam Engines

[1OneHuman]

So I got the game this Christmas, and was going through the campaign, and my factories were going pretty well. Only problem I've been having is trying to figure out how steam engine productivity works. Most of the time it says it has the possibility for full productivity, but only goes about half. For some reason now it's not even half. It's around 1/16 of how much it says it can. I have no idea if this has something to do with pollution, but I checked and the area around them are yellow level, which I assume isn't bad. Also, I have solar panels, and they are barely producing anything as well. All of the engines have full water coming to them, and the water is a perfect 100 degrees. I tried removing some engines as maybe it can't handle too many at once, but that did nothing.

[Zerias]

The first bar, 'Performance', is what your boilers are running at. It shows 1/16th of maximum because your machines/factory only needs 1/16 of it's maximum output's worth of electricity. If this bar is nearly empty, you have more generators than you need. If it is full you are not generating enough power and your factory will slow down or turn off. The second bar is the maximum output determined by the temperature of the water going into the boiler. If this bar is low you have either not enough water or not enough boilers heating the water, and your generator will not produce as much power as it could. If this bar is full then that generator has enough to run at full capacity,about 550 kw per generator. You have 24 generators there, at 1/16th of maximum means your factory only needs less than a megawatt of power [more easily visible by checking your power grid via the power poles]. In theory, you could run your factory off of 3 boilers and 2 generators, with a little buffer for future expansion.

[1OneHuman]

So I took away most of the generators, leaving three. Now they work at about half productivity, however the rest of the factory still isn't getting enough energy. Perhaps I should've mentioned this before, but the main problem was that the energy wasn't being produced, not necessarily just that I felt the productivity wasn't high enough.

[1OneHuman]

Well I just figured out my problem. Turns out the main factory wasn't actually connected to the engines. Fixed the problem, had to add a few more boilers, and added a few generators back. I kinda feel stupid for not checking this but at least I did now.

[SpeedDaemon]

Well I just figured out my problem. Turns out the main factory wasn't actually connected to the engines. Fixed the problem, had to add a few more boilers, and added a few generators back. I kinda feel stupid for not checking this but at least I did now.

Don't feel too bad... I'm guessing almost everyone around here has accidentally split their power grid at one time or another. All it takes is removing one pole.

Also, as Zerias suggested, click on any power pole to look at information for the power grid it's connected to. The window will list the number and type of generators currently contributing to the grid, so if those numbers aren't what you expect, it might point you to any problems.