Feeding Furnace with Iron Ore

[Mediocre]

Hello,

Ive been playing Factorio for a few days now and I'm having a blast!

One recurring issue I have with my Factories is that my Iron Ore supply is not enough to feed my Furnaces. Any advice would be great!

[impetus maximus]

your not getting enough ore to the furnaces. the first furnaces are gobbling up all the ore.
welcome to the forums.

[Mediocre]

Yes I know! hehe

How can I solve this, I Have 20 electric miners, do I need even more? How many miners feed 24 Furnaces?

Right now I am considering not using a Splitter for the 2 lanes of ore. Instead I could get a separate Iron ore mining facility and feed each line with its own mine.

[reallyLost]

You don't have a problem with the setup, you just need more ore. There are more iron patches out on the map. Have fun trying to collect them with aliens all around.

[impetus maximus]

BTW you don't need that much coal. you can split the coal/ore on one belt.
something like this. coal on the near side of the belt works best.

ore.coal.splitter.png (298.62 KiB) Viewed 6761 times

[Xeorm]

Yes I know! hehe

How can I solve this, I Have 20 electric miners, do I need even more? How many miners feed 24 Furnaces?

Right now I am considering not using a Splitter for the 2 lanes of ore. Instead I could get a separate Iron ore mining facility and feed each line with its own mine.

Splitting does have the advantage of being the simpler option with differences in size or as ore runs out in one location.

But, math time! Going off the wiki (https://wiki.factorio.com/Electric_mining_drill) the mining drill mines iron ore at a speed of .525 ore / second. The iron plate recipe has a crafting time of 3.5 seconds, but a steel furnace like you have crafts at twice the speed, so only takes 1.75 seconds. 1.75 * .525 =.92 furnaces per drill, or about 1 to 1.

Since you have approximately the same number of miners and furnaces, you'd expect to be almost at capacity, but you're far away from it. You need to remember about the belts too. If your miners deposit directly on the belt, they won't work if there's already an ore in the space, so you'll see some loss of efficiency there. Your setup leads too to the right wing leading entirely onto one side of the main belt, so any miners on the right of the main belt basically don't work ever. Have the wings go up instead of down and you'll get a fair increase in production. Also check out load balancing.

[vtx]

You place too many drills on the same side of the belts.

7 on left side.
15 on right side.

Yellow belt have a throughtput of 13.33 items/sec.

So 13.33 i/s divide by 0.525 production ore = 25.39 drill max

So no more than 12.69 drill per side.

You jammed 4 drills on right side doing nothing. Try instead to make all 3 belts lane from minning going up and merge them with splitter. If you place all your drill on same belt lane you should use underground belt for the last few drill ( better compression ).

[Mediocre]

BTW you don't need that much coal. you can split the coal/ore on one belt.
something like this. coal on the near side of the belt works best.

ore.coal.splitter.png

I had problems with this idea because the splitter only split half the material. The design you posted is awesome! Get 2 splitters to feed 2 lanes!

Splitting does have the advantage of being the simpler option with differences in size or as ore runs out in one location.

But, math time! Going off the wiki (https://wiki.factorio.com/Electric_mining_drill) the mining drill mines iron ore at a speed of .525 ore / second. The iron plate recipe has a crafting time of 3.5 seconds, but a steel furnace like you have crafts at twice the speed, so only takes 1.75 seconds. 1.75 * .525 =.92 furnaces per drill, or about 1 to 1.

Since you have approximately the same number of miners and furnaces, you'd expect to be almost at capacity, but you're far away from it. You need to remember about the belts too. If your miners deposit directly on the belt, they won't work if there's already an ore in the space, so you'll see some loss of efficiency there. Your setup leads too to the right wing leading entirely onto one side of the main belt, so any miners on the right of the main belt basically don't work ever. Have the wings go up instead of down and you'll get a fair increase in production. Also check out load balancing.

Thanks a lot for the advice. Really appreciate you breaking this down for me

You place too many drills on the same side of the belts.

7 on left side.
15 on right side.

Yellow belt have a throughtput of 13.33 items/sec.

So 13.33 i/s divide by 0.525 production ore = 25.39 drill max

So no more than 12.69 drill per side.

You jammed 4 drills on right side doing nothing. Try instead to make all 3 belts lane from minning going up and merge them with splitter. If you place all your drill on same belt lane you should use underground belt for the last few drill ( better compression ).

My ore Screenshot is tiny, but I definitely have a even number of miners on both sides of the track. Thanks though

[impetus maximus]

I had problems with this idea because the splitter only split half the material. The design you posted is awesome! Get 2 splitters to feed 2 lanes!

no problem. the beauty of that design is it strips material from both halves of both ore & fuel belts.
if you "side load' as many do, it would pull from one half but not the other. (on a fully compressed belt)

[Greybeard_LXI]

My ore Screenshot is tiny, but I definitely have a even number of miners on both sides of the track. Thanks though

The side loading at the bottom puts all the ore from the right wing on the same side of the belt. If you put a splitter there to join the belts ore from the right wing would be on both sides of the belt.

[vtx]

My ore Screenshot is tiny, but I definitely have a even number of miners on both sides of the track. Thanks though

Because you merge the lane to the Right into the middle lane all items are placed to the right side of the middle lane.

From the image we can see that the ore are blocking 3 or 4 last drills of the right side.