I don't know how water flows based on your picture, but unless you have a constant flow underneath, you practically never get the full power. I've been using water reactors and the like for as long as I remember, and I rarely get more than 700 continuous power out of 10 wheels. I get full 1000 at the start, but in time it goes down and stabilises at lower level (like 70% or so). Without supplementing water occasionally the power output falls further, till it's too small to move all attached wheels and mechanisms, and the reactor stops. This is due to water evaporation. And fluctuating power is normal with reactors, so you need to observe it a bit and then average, to get actual power rating.
Hence it's hard to do an infinite reactor, I always build a "starter" mechanism, to ditch new quantity of water in case it stopped on its own, or I had to stop it manually for maintenance (the last one was especially frequent when trees were one tile big).
Also, every wheel needs 10 power to move, so one working wheel can move a couple of others, plus attached gears and axles (hence the animation). If you have only one wheel, then it uses 10 power out of 100 produced, giving your net power of 90, but some of this is always used by the axle or gear required by the wheel, plus the rest of transmission line.
Most of problems can be avoided by utilising either an aquifer or a constant source of water, like river, instead of a reactor. Advantage of reactor is that it can be almost completely isolated (and thus protected from enemies), easily scaled (if you thought about it) and built where you want it, even far from water sources, like down there near magma.
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Topic: Water Wheel Troubles (Read 1065 times)