Ok now i know some of you will be thinking "Why the title?" One main reason. Water power is a pain in the butt to get working efficiently. There are power problems, cable type problems, connection problems and of course water problems. In this quick guide i'll talk you through the best setup i have found for water power.

Water mills -

These really are quite useless for bulk power but enough of them will give you a good start in tekkit. 8 of these will produce the same power as 1 water strainer, around 2EU/t. So batboxes are a good idea. Water mills can be placed in the center of a pool of water 3x3 will do. Regardless to what some guides say, i have found that the water can be still and produce just as much as a flowing source.
Ok onto cabling. use tin cable which is 3 tin ingots along the top slots on the crafting grid, there really isn't much point in using anything else as it would take so many of these to burn out a tin cable that you may as well upgrade to strainers.

Water Strainers -

Here is where my talent for water generation really took off. Since the Tekkit server launched i've been hard at work trying to find a good reliable source of renewable energy. As above i found mills were useless so i decided to upgrade to strainers. My initial setups were clunky and slow with quite a few problems. I have since then managed to get it down to an art form. For 5 water strainers you need 1 pump, 4 RS engines, 1 Tank, 2 wooden waterproof pipe and a pile of stone or gold waterproof pipe.
Here is the setup. Create a pool of water 3x3 (warning this will glitch and drain quick on occasion so i'd suggest creating one large pool for all your pumps.) block out and place your pump directly over the center square giving you an 8 source block path around the pump to refil with infini water each time the pump activates. Now place 3 RS engings onto the side of the pump, 1 switch placed on the back of the pump to power all 3 engines. Put 1 section of wood pipe ontop of the pump then place your tank onto that. Atop the tank place another section of wood pipe and the last RS engine attached to it. Use the other piping and attach it to your water strainer. turn both sets of pumps on and there you go. the water should now be flowing happily to your strainer and powering it. Also note that the RS pumps do take a while to warm up, when the colour changes to yellow that's the optimum speed for water power. if they turn red they stall so make sure you stick to using those 3 engines per pump.
Ok now as for cabling and power the best setup i have (which i will link a picture of at the end) Is to use multiple strainers, glass fiber cable and an MFSU. If you want to connect an MFE or batbox i'd suggest using shielded copper or gold but really you can experiment and find where your own cable limitations are. After connecting you should be getting power to your storage.
Here is my setup with gains me around 1000Eu per second to my MFSU which as of last night charged to 1.7mil in around 15 minutes (may be off on that timing. i was building that's how it looked though)

Here is my setup, the pumps are actually hidden behind plates for aesthetics.

I hope this guide helps you. I will warn you of one glitch however. the water pools tend to drain randomly due to a warp or TP glitch when you enter the chunk. You may need to refill the pool from time to time. Create a 3 block infinity pool near by so you can just bucket water back into the main pool. Good luck and thank you for reading.


(excuse the empty tanks, i just turned it all on)

My setup is using 43 water strainers, 8 pumps, gold pipe and glass fiber cables to an MFSU. 1000EU per second. which seems to be the most efficient charge from water strainers unless you keep adding more pumps and strainers .

I think i got everything in there, please feel free to comment or if you find anything you want to add.

That room is so purdy! What's the texture pack!?

Thank ya. It's Soartex fanver 256x

Must it be the tekkit version, or is it my problem?
I installed and everything but it only did the vanilla textures.

Yeah i'm using the soartex fanver texture pack

wow, sorry looking through the post i hadn't noticed i had already said the texture pack i was using . Yeah it's probably on your side Chang. Have to put the texture in the "/roaming/.technic/tekkit/textures" folder. and if you want to use it on standard vanilla as well. put it in the ".minecraft/textures" folder

Please close this thread as strainers are banned.

Well as this thread persists its worth noting that water mills can produce 1eu/t (actually its 2) if water is put into them using buckets, and this can be automated by means of a deployer/retriever setup.



This consumes a small amount of blutricity to operate the retriever but unlike the pump+strainer setup it consumes no EU at all. One Thermopile generator can power the retriever with no need for batteries.

If hand placing the mill array makes you lose the will to live you should be able to automate even that with a filler.

Tested: the filler will place the tubes and mills but not the wiring.

Each mill can give 2EU/t and since the crafting recipe gives 2 mills for each generator that means 4EU/t per generator!

Due to packet sizes the power will pass through tin cable fine regardless of how many mills you parallel. This means you can transfer the power a long way in tin cable. After a storage device or transformer you will need the correct cable.

32 mills needed a 0.5s timer for full output. To keep things "Server friendly" you could use the batbox "Emit if full" behavior to halt the timer when not needed, or add an item detector.