Burner Inserters vs Inserters

[Anduin1357]

What's so great about using obsolete burner inserters when you can use electric inserters that even as fast inserters, have 5.625 times less than the energy requirements of burner inserters?

imho if you have any sort of 1/10th total energy from solar or heck, even a single, backup, burner inserter steam power station, then you don't need the extra energy consumption of quite literally the most inefficient mover ever seen.

Can someone please explain like I'm five how useful are burner inserters as I honestly for the life of me cannot come to terms with how inefficient some players really want to be with their fuel.

Postscript

• The efficiency of inserters is 13.85 times greater than burner inserters.

• For all intents and purposes, giving a few boilers some fuel would increase temperatures enough to kick the steam engines back up.

• Or just use some water tanks of heated water.

[mooklepticon]

Let's go a step further. *Should* they be nearly 14 times more efficient?

[Anduin1357]

Let's go a step further. *Should* they be nearly 14 times more efficient?

Surprising coming from the fast inserter in question! I'm guessing you don't want to be 15.625 times more efficient then.

[BlakeMW]

Actually those numbers are wrong, the energy per insert is the joules per second (kW) multiplied by the seconds required to perform the insert.

Burner Inserter:
Energy Use: 180kW
Time Per Insert: 1.7s
Energy Per Insert: 180 * 1.7 = 306kJ
Drain: 0W

Basic Inserter:
Energy Use: 13kW
Time per Insert: 1.2s
Energy Per Insert: 13 * 1.2 = 15.6kJ
Drain: 400W

Making the fair assumption of coal power, we need to double the basic inserter energy use to account for the 50% efficiency of boilers:

Burner vs Basic:
Energy Per Insert: 306kJ vs 31.2kJ
Drain: 0kW vs 0.8kW

So the burner inserter uses pretty close to 10x the coal-energy per insert. And the point where the idle drain causes the basic inserter to use more energy is about 1 insert every 5 minutes - a rate so slow it might only be achieved by a burner inserter loading ammo into a turret at a rarely attacked location or a burner inserter at an almost unused backup steam power plant.

Now as for why you might use it anyway: I'll link to the current world record speed run at the point where AntiElitz builds his first automated steam power plant.
https://youtu.be/IqzdKyrIGfk?t=1122

He uses burner inserters. Why?
Well I don't really know but he's clearly decided they're the best option at that stage of the game. The main benefit is they don't require electricity which allows high density boiler layouts before substations. But they're also cheaper and much faster to hand craft before green circuit automation. I suspect the speed of hand crafting may be the main reason he uses burner inserters even for the first row which could easily be basic inserters. (if you wonder why he doesn't use burners for anything else: Well when a burner pulls from a pure coal belt it can always fuel itself, but if there is a mixed coal/ore belt it's possible it'll take ore first and then stall until the player fixes it and also when there are burners pulling from both sides of a belt it's possible one will whiff several times and then stall - the possibility of stalling is completely unacceptable for something which must work unattended and using the 100% headache-free electric inserter is a no-brainer).

[Anduin1357]

Actually those numbers are wrong, the energy per insert is the joules per second (kW) multiplied by the seconds required to perform the insert.

Well great. Someone change the numbers on the wiki to kW-seconds to reduce confusion on what it signifies...

So the burner inserter uses pretty close to 10x the coal-energy per insert. And the point where the idle drain causes the basic inserter to use more energy is about 1 insert every 5 minutes - a rate so slow it might only be achieved by ... a burner inserter at an almost unused backup steam power plant.

About the energy it takes for burner inserters to pull 5 coal off the belt into the boiler as being cheaper than inserters doing the same thing, assuming that the backup engagement rate is actually significant enough to make you want to spend resources making a redundant steam power station...

Movement of 1 unit item by burner inserter - Movement of 1 unit item by inserter / idle energy of inserter per second

306kJ - 15.6kJ / 800W
= 187.5 seconds or 3 minutes, 7.5 seconds.
In the case of boilers,
3 minutes, 7.5 seconds * 5
= 937.5 seconds or 15 minutes, 37.5 seconds.

So power outages must happen every 15 and a little over a half minutes in order for inserters to be more efficient than burner inserters at the task of fuelling boilers for steam engines.

Additionally, when you switch from yellow belts to red belts, your inserters are in a better position to grab fuel from the higher capacity/speed belt.

only be achieved by a burner inserter loading ammo into a turret at a rarely attacked location...

If you're loading ammo with burners at a rarely attacked location, I must ask why even load ammo at all?
The location is rarely attacked and 100 ammunition lasts a long while, what's with the hassle?

Thanks for the reply though, it was informative to see one awesome use of burner inserters for once.