Factorio Forums

The solutions for 1 & 2 rely on manual wiring and 'sharing' accumulators between two separate power networks.

To separate solar power, create two substations next to one another, and shift-click the substations to remove their connecting wires. In the 'shared' area, place accumulators. manually wire one substation with the solar power network, and the other with the steam power network, and you've created a failover coupling. When power for one side or the other fails to accumulator power, the other network will power up to feed the draining accumulators bank. The rate of power exchanged depends on the number of accumulators (~300 per shared accumulator)

To 'flip' a Steam plant to only power on during the day, have a wood power pole with no connections (shift-click) that links a solar panel with an inserter that supplies fuel to the boiler line. When the power level drops, the inserter stops providing fuel to the boilers. To make this happen faster, add lamps to match daytime output so the inserter slows/stops when it starts to get dark.

The third depends on the length of the boiler line. A pyramid splitters fed by a single standard inserter can (slowly) and individually feed each boiler. This requires a power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, or 32) number of boilers, as a 'solid pyramid' will weigh the central boilers heavily compared to the ends.

To compare something you need a mirror.

alternate coal and wood?

Nobody said, that we can't use a mirrored power production.

2 steam engines, 2 boilers, 2 smart inserter, 1 fast inserter, 1 smart chest, 3-4 green wires, 1-2 poles, some belts, pump(s), pipes, etc. For the testing also 3 radars (energy consumption), a chest with the coal filled into (works with any type of fuel, but not mixed), and a fast inserter, which puts them on the belts. For starting I need to put one coal in any boiler.

The both smart inserters are just configured to "Coal < 1".
It starts by placing one or two coal in any boiler. The left inserter begins to work. Lower inserter puts coal in chest. blue inserter in burner. This goes on, until 5 coal are in the lower boiler.
The coal runs thru to the upper boiler and waits for inserting. When one coal in the lower is burned, both smart inserters will insert. Because both boilers are on the same network and both burn the same type of fuel they both burn in the same speed, so in the upper boiler is never more than 1 coal.

Pretend the chest on the right, above the power pole, has a piece of wood in it.

The piece of wood is detected by the middle-left smart inserter, which moves one piece of copper to the second chest in the chain. Then the middle-right smart inserter detects the copper in the second chest, and removes it. At the same time, the top-left smart inserter also detects the copper in the second chest, and extracts a piece of coal, which gets placed in the boiler.

A moment later, the inserter chain at the bottom right finishes moving the copper plate into the bottom chest. The bottom smart inserter detects this, and moves it back to the chest it was originally in. At the same time, the top-right smart inserter detects it and extracts the piece of wood. The top-left normal inserter (the one feeding into the boiler) will wait until the boiler slot has no coal in it, and then move the wood into the boiler. The boiler won't burn the wood as it's still burning the last piece of coal, so the top smart inserter extracts the wood from the boiler (in 0.9.2+), resetting the machine.

For a slightly improved response time, the top conveyor can be replaced by an inserter chain, or even a smart-inserter-chain that keeps a spare piece of wood at the end of the chain.