According to the Feed the Beast Wiki article, Electrical Engines take 6 EU/t and output 2 MJ/t. Since I'm powering a forestry machine outside of my main power station, I wanted to use efficient cabling to transfer power to the engines. So I thought I'd use Tin Cable because it's much cheaper than Glass Fibre Cable. However, Tin Cable can only withstand 5 EU/t; no problem, just upgrade my Electrical Engines with a Small Curcuit Board containing an Iron Electron Tube, which reduces the power required by 1 EU/t.
So I built two Electric Engines, and gave them both a Small Curcuit Board upgrade with Iron Electron Tube. I connected them to a Logger and Arboretum, and then wired up some Tin Cable from an LV transformer pulling off of my main power storage. As soon as I placed the last cable, the whole cable exploded and disappeared! Isn't the EU/t based on what is being requested on the far end, which should be 5 EU/t? Why can't I use Tin Cable in this situation?
Best Answer
The LV Transformer outputs 32 eu/packet which causes the cable to explode. It doesn't matter how much is requested as the EU network deals in packets.
All machines that run on EU have a certain packet size they can accept or output. This is independent of what is doing the accepting.
Tin cables are only meant to collect the output from low tier generators (like solars and water mills) into a aggregator which transforms it into a higher setup of energy.