[shagie]

Capacitor circuit network warning for alarm for "main grid is drawing on this bank - bad things may happen if capacity is not increased."

Another "trick" is those burner inserters are black start capable. They can pick up fuel and feed themselves to keep running without an electrical network.

I also tend to put Schmitt triggers in low priority areas. They've got a battery on the main grid next to them and if the battery drops below 50% power they remain off until it goes back above 75% power.

[tux3]

Can't wait for a Factorio mod that simulates the grid frequency and damages equipment when it drifts too far!

[shagie]

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/k16oom/better_pow... discusses the idea a bit.

[LorenPechtel]

That's a mod, not stock. It does two things: feeds the inserter from either end (something I think should be stock--it's a machine that grabs things, why can't it grab fuel it can reach??) and provides a trickle of power to unpowered ones (nice from a standpoint of not having to fuel them when you put them down, but it also adds blackstart capability.

As for 50%/75% triggers--the game doesn't model start/stop problems, only fancy circuit setups would give a hoot about being fed by flickering power. (But as a human....I was out adding to a big accumulator bank at twilight. Far away the bugs had a base close enough to my laser turrets that they kept attacking. The sun was powering my base but didn't have enough for the turrets. The whole bank would flicker for every bug. Usually the electrical indicator on the accumulators is a good thing.)

[shagie]

Burner inserters are stock. https://wiki.factorio.com/Burner_inserter

> The burner inserter is the most basic and slowest type of inserters. It is powered by burning fuel, compared to the more advanced inserters which are powered by electricity. It will add fuel to its own supply if it picks any up, which makes it useful for filling boilers with coal. This has the advantage that it will continue working even if the power fails, as opposed to electrically-powered inserters which will be unable to function.

In particular, when power demand drops below the supply everything starts running slower, which in turn means that the electrical inserters used to feed coal into the boilers run slower which drops the rate of electrical production. Burner inserters don't have that problem.

---

Schmitt triggers are really easy with stock multi combinators now. It isn't so much a "things have issue with flickering power" but rather "turn off the coal feed to the steel furnaces that would go to the electrical station instead" and "make sure that the coal unloading station doesn't brown out" and "turn off power to the electrical furnaces and labs to make sure that the coal mines don't dip in production rate when power dims".

The Schmitt trigger also makes for more reasonable "where is there excess oil that I should produce solid fuel from?" There's the optimal, but sometimes in the processing you can't crack any more crude to gas because the heavy oil is backed up, so turn on the appropriate cracking station when {conditions} and turn it off when {conditions}.

[LorenPechtel]

Burner inserters are stock, I didn't realize the fuel leech was now stock. It didn't used to be. And the ability to slowly grab fuel without any source of power is definitely mod. And the mod can leech fuel it's not actually handling--a burner inserter pulling from a furnace will take fuel from the furnace for it's own operation.

I'm just saying what's the need for a gap between on and off? How does the bounce harm anything in the game? Simply put the non-critical stuff behind combinators that will switch off at x% of power. Real world machinery wouldn't like that but the game factories don't care. Nor do the refineries--in your oil case, plonk down a tank of heavy oil, turn on the crackers when it's above a certain level.

[shagie]

The fuel leach has been that way for a long time.

https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?title=Burner_inserter&ol... (edit from 2016)

> Since v0.10.0, any Fuel items picked up by a burner inserter will also be used to power the inserter. This makes it useful for:

> Automatically loading Gun turrets from a Transport belt, where one side of the belt is filled with magazines and the other with Coal.

> Filling Boilers with Coal. This has the advantage that they will continue working even if the power fails. This is not the case for electrically powered inserters.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history/0.10.0#0.10.0

> Burner inserter will use item with fuel value for itself when it has empty inventory.

0.10.0 was released 2014.

---

The flickering isn't a problem (though a high frequency flicker can caused the power chart to be difficult to read).

A consistent drain on power that is causing capacitor levels to drop below some threshold suggests that certain things should be turned off before the problem becomes cascading when capacitor supply drops to 0.

[LorenPechtel]

Except that in many cases the "consistent" drain is simply night. (Or, day, on Fulgora.) Other than making the chart easier to read what's the case where a 50%/75% trigger is superior to a straight up enable if > 50%?

And apparently I misunderstood the mod, it leeches from things it could pick up but doesn't. It was probably written before it became stock and thus contained some out of date text.