Two probably dumb questions (pets / wiring)

[DanielHall15]

I only found this game on Tuesday and since then it has successfully sucked all life out of me.    I do have a few (probably noob) questions, though, for which the Wiki and the search function didn't help me...

1. In my current colony I have now had three fires due to faulty wiring causing explosions and battery discharges. The first two were minor, but the last time 12 half-full batteries discharged into the recreational room and three guys were burned quite nicely... This never happened in my three prior colonies which fell victim to other, various horrible things, like trying to kill a thrumbo...

Is this a problem of insufficient skill of the guy laying the wires? I have construction on for most people in this colony, and none of them are particularly inept at the task. Or is it does that the battery room has to be kept at a constant temperature? I have never done any cooling / heating of the room before, and I didn't have issues until this time.

2. I'm having some issues comprehending how domesticated animals get fed. I know they feed themselves if not being fed while being trained, and therefore need access to food.

Right now I had a pair of muffalos and a pair of huskies. This is in winter. I bought up some hay earlier and had a stockpile outside once the muffalos ran out of grass on the grazing range in fall. This worked well until I ran out of hay, due to pesky critters (squirrels, hares, my own huskies...) feeding off that stockpile, too, and of course then no trader had any hay, and it was the middle of winter... Then I saw the muffalos consume some bushes and thought, okay, we'll be fine. Well, we weren't. With plenty of bushes still around, they stopped eating them, the female miscarried by now, and I have no plant food left over whatsoever. I assume they only feed on bushes that are 100% grown, because none of those are left over?

The huskies meanwhile like to sleep in the middle of the frozen meat storage while starving. They ate all the daylilies, though. When those were gone, they tried to starve in a pile of boar meat. I have now put a 1-tile stockpile outside and had it set to critical to get some meat out there, and they jumped all over it.

Could it be that easy that animals don't eat frozen food? Technically it was also freezing outside when they finally ate the boar meat...

Some help, please! Another miscarried little muffalo or husky and I'm gonna cry ...! 

[SlimeCrusher]

1- It's just a random event, wich means that it happens for no reason. All you can do about it is either not connect your batteries to the main power source or just don't use batteries at all and rely on geothermal power at night. So don't eat your colonists on lavish meals because they don't know how to install power conduits. 

2- There's quite a few reasons they aren't eating, i suppose it's allowed areas or something to do with that. So i'll just give you a solution to the "squirrels, boomrats, etc eating your animal's food" problem, wich is to make a barn, put all your pet sleeping spots (or whatever you use) inside there along with a 1x1 stockpile (seems to work best) that only accepts hay and is INSIDE the barn, not outside, that way, outside critters won't eat your food, while your animals, that can open doors, will eat it.

[DanielHall15]

1. Yay, randomness!    Well, thankfully I have power lines run right under people's beds routinely.

2. Okay, I just had my animals outside so far all the time. Time to build a barn then, I guess. It was just so convenient to have them munch grass all the time and not bother too much.

Thx!

[milon]

1. The problem is charged batteries connected to a power conduit. Any battery carrying any amount of a charge has a small chance to explode. The solution is to not use batteries or else to keep them behind a switch (turned off until needed) and without any conduit added.

2. Barns work, or else a critical priority stockpile immediately inside the freezer that animals have access to.