Factorio Forums

I found out interesting feature.

1. Build solar panel
2. Build one pole on each side of panel
3. Disconnect poles in order: Bottom, Right, Top
4. Build Accumulators



Now Accumulators will be charged in order. First will be charged Left accumulator and after full charged, Bottom accumulator will start charging, then Right and Top as last one. When we start discharging accumulator, all with lower priority will stop charging and all power will be directed to that one we draining.

Ok, rookie question. How do you disconnect the poles?

-root wrote:Ok, rookie question. How do you disconnect the poles?

Shift click on a pole. You can also change the keybinds in the options.

Hm.

This can be interesting to measure, if a network has enough power yet: if the second, third, fourth accu has enough power to drive an inserter, we can say: yes, the previous accu must have enough but not the next.

Dunno, if that logic can be used for anything...

Could it not be used as a sort of breaker box to power-fail certain areas of your factory when insufficient power, while keeping others receiving power?

I'd have to test to see if this would apply if the solar power were replaced with a medium/large pole, but I'd envision it being used in a power-negative environment to, for example, turn off all electric furnaces at night when power production falls while keeping laser defenses and assemblers online, and then failing assemblers if needed while keeping laser defenses online.

Then again, there may be other means to do the same

Sorry for the necro, but I'm reasonably certain I have the answer to this particular behavior.

Separating power poles makes them create a new power network, and these networks are numbered in ascending order.
Since new networks were created in a counterclockwise order, that's the order that the network numbers were assigned, and the order power was distributed.
The process of getting these networks to number as desired may prove problematic for any case where there are more than 2 networks, especially if debugging to see network numbers isn't used.

West pole has original network number, which will be the lowest number, then south to north have further ascending network numbers.

This is probably an unintended bug, but it is one that could be used as a mechanism for some builds, as sloshmonger described.