Power production/Dealing with priorities

The Electricity/Priority of power production is every month part of a discussion. This page tries to bring all points of this discussion together.

How to switch off steam engines in the night, when enough accumulator capacity is available?

At some point, when you have enough solar panels and accumulators you may use the steam engines only as silent power-reserve, for example at the end of the night after a long fight. This is normally not possible, because steam engines have a higher priority than accumulators - accumulators are only discharged if nothing else delivers. Or in other words, when the sun goes down, the steam engines turn on to keep the accumulators charged.

But you can trick around this:

The accumulator (hovered) is loaded from the main network. The accu-powered-network unloads this accu to power the fast inserter. If the accu is empty, the fast inserter doesn't work anymore, but the basic inserter remains working, because he is powered by the main network. He unloads the remaining wood from the chest. The chest gets empty and the smart inserter begins to work, filling up coal into the boiler.

For simpleness we reduced it to only one boiler/steam engine, normally much more is needed to make sense! Note, that you only need to program the first inserter. Place the others with pressed shift-key. All you have to do then is to connect it with the wire.

Basically this works, because the accumulator in this picture unloads a bit faster, than the accus in the main network, because he stays in two networks and so a bit more power is needed. It is recommended to place a second accu in neighborhood, which sits in the main network to have a direct reference.

You can trim the accu powered network exactly to your needs by adding more accumulators or place some lights, or put in more wood, which extends or shorten the time before the accu(s) - and so the chest - is empty. With some experience you can trim this so, that the main accu power is empty after the steam engines are full powered again (it takes some time, until the boilers heat the water and steam engines are at full power again.)

Another example

File:Autoshutoff2.png

The red circle is the "sensor". Watch the green wires going to the inserters.

The chests with the burner inserters holding wood in his hand (so the chests must be filled with wood), is for fallback, if coal goes out.

Various different setups seem possible...

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Notes

Tip for placing many smart inserters: Place all smart inserter by click-run. Set the program for the first inserter and wire it. Shift-right-click copies the program to your buffer, left-right-click copies the stored program into the inserter. The wire is then also be placed.

It is recommended to use a blue-print for that programming, cause the blueprint stores all needed informations (but has a problem to set the needed wires).

A way to set this up without complicate cabling

Todo: bring this more up

http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6617&p=51742#p51714

http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6617

http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6665