[0.17.69] (Modded) heat box energy source disconnects from grid

[zebediah49]

The "Heat Furnace" mod provides furnaces powered by heat, with heatpipe connections. I have a circumstance where:

• Build some heat furnaces
• Get them up to temperature
• Build some more furnaces (also some ghosts)
• Some subset of the initial furnaces disconnect from the grid
• After the grid is heated back up to greater than their initial disconnection temperature, they rejoin

I have attached a save file which exhibits this behavior. Over the next few minutes the furnaces steadily online themselves further. There is a very interesting point at roughly 7:32:00 when the left disconnected line gets to temperature, reconnects, reconnects with a bunch of cold furnaces, cools down to off, and that sudden temperature jump causes disconnections elsewhere.

It also appears that sticking a single heat pipe onto one of the hot furnaces doesn't connect at all. Sometimes (i.e. I just retried it and it worked that time).

[TruePikachu]

I can't do any testing right now, but:

• Does this still happen in the latest version of Factorio?
• Does this happen with the vanilla heat exchangers?
• What is the disconnect temperature?
• What happens if the furnace is used (reducing the temperature) while it is disconnected?

I pulled the most recent version of the mod (changelog says the relevant portions hadn't changed since this thread was made); it doesn't run any Lua mid-game, only during data load. It specifies an operational temperature of 500°, which would be my first guess as to the disconnect threshold (possibly so that the machine doesn't cool down beyond the operational temperature as a result of external forces; recall that normal machines use an energy buffer that is only drained by machine operation or idle drain, and never by external forces). If this is the case, a dry heat exchanger would theoretically exhibit the same behaviour, elevating this to a pure-vanilla bug.

[whosrdaddy]

I don"t know if this is the same problem but I have "active" disconnected heat pipes (vanilla game with squeak through mod - 0.17.79) :

[boskid]

Unless you can reproduce this in current experimental i consider this to be a duplicate. There were fixes in 0.18.0 and 0.18.7 around heat pipes so this issue could be already resolved.