Electricity consumption monitoring

[Joe Kerbal]

Hellow. I'm dealing with my very first space station. I had to rescue it once because of running out of electricity. Now, for unknown reason, it's again with batteries at zero. For sure the design and planning has been poor but still I'd like to understand at least where the consumption is to properly understand if there's something I can simply switch off or get rid off or, the other way around, add a new and big enough solad panel module. 

Is there a way to have a detailed energy consumption rate for a vessel?

[linuxgurugamer]

1 hour ago, Joe Kerbal said:

Hellow. I'm dealing with my very first space station. I had to rescue it once because of running out of electricity. Now, for unknown reason, it's again with batteries at zero. For sure the design and planning has been poor but still I'd like to understand at least where the consumption is to properly understand if there's something I can simply switch off or get rid off or, the other way around, add a new and big enough solad panel module. 

Is there a way to have a detailed energy consumption rate for a vessel?

Two mods, Fusebox and Ampyear.  Ampyear is more complex and has more overhead.

[Streetwind]

Not in stock KSP. But there are mods that offer this functionality (see above).

There aren't that many electricity consumers in stock KSP either, though, so it should be possible to narrow it down. Possible background consumers include: probe cores (permanently on but only minor power draw), active radiators (if you just want them for looks you can keep them turned off), the mobile processing lab (constant 5 Ec/s while active), resource producers and refineries (unlikely to matter for a space station), illuminators (minor but constant while on), and the four sensor experiments (only when set to actively monitor their data).

Other parts exist that consume power, but only when you actively use them (electric engines, wheels, Breaking Ground robotics parts, reaction wheels, and such).

[Rainshine]

By default, in my experience, reaction wheels seem to consume power constantly, unless you change their state to either, for example, torque off, or SAS only and then turn off SAS. I can't tell you the number of probes I've had fail because I timewarped without turning the reaction wheels to SAS only, and it drained 24000 units of battery power during the warp.

[Cavscout74]

Best guess would be a lab running while going through the night - a station in a 150km orbit will need over 3200 Ec just to power the lab through the night, not counting any other power drain & assuming it's purely solar powered.

[Streetwind]

11 hours ago, Rainshine said:

By default, in my experience, reaction wheels seem to consume power constantly, unless you change their state to either, for example, torque off, or SAS only and then turn off SAS. I can't tell you the number of probes I've had fail because I timewarped without turning the reaction wheels to SAS only, and it drained 24000 units of battery power during the warp.

Reaction wheels should not consume power during time warp. The vessel is put "on rails" - that means that it cannot move or be moved from its pre-set path and orientation. All motion is frozen, no control inputs are processed, and all control authority systems are disabled. The state the reactions wheels were in at the moment of activating time warp does not matter. And after over 1000 hours in KSP across the years, I'm fairly confident in saying that this tends to work fairly reliably

If you indeed saw what you describe, then you might have been playing with exotic mods, or you misattributed another system's power drain, or you observed a bug.