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When you look at inserter power cost, it seems that the basic inserter (13 kW) is cheaper than the long-handed inserter (18 kW) and fast inserter (32 kW). But the basic inserter is also the slowest, so maybe it is not so simple.

I decided to run a test.



Each inserter gets 5 MJ of energy, and has to use that to fill a box with as much coal as possible.

Results
Inserter: 726 coal
Long-handed inserter: 736 coal
Fast inserter: 756 coal
Smart inserter: 544 coal

The results are very close, but the fast inserter uses the least power!


Interestingly, inserters do not run at full power all the time. The graph looks like this.

Nice work! I never thought to test that, and I just assumed that fast was worse for power usage. I guess that means that basic inserters are completely obsolete once you get fast inserters then.
Unless...
What if you take into account the extra materials and power used in their production? How long would it take for the marginally higher efficiency to justify the upgrade?

Great - just found out that the inserter speeds have been adjusted. Now I'm gonna have to rebalance my sorter station. We need a faster smart inserter, not slower

Cool

What's idle power usage for fast / normal inserter respectively? It seems like normal inserters idle at 4.6kW, with rather short spikes to 13kW when working.

When busy 100% of the time like in your experiment, the fast inserter uses less power per inserted item. But how about when it's only inserting 1 item every x seconds, i.e. less than 100% load? Is the fast inserter superior in every case? If idle power usage of fast inserters is higher than that of normal inserters, there may be cases where the normal inserter uses less power on average.

The power-consumption for the inserters are:

basic-inserter:
drain: 0.4 kW
energy_per_movement: 5000
energy_per_rotation: 5000

long-handed-inserter:
drain: 0.4 kW
energy_per_movement: 5000
energy_per_rotation: 5000

fast-inserter:
drain: 0.4 kW
energy_per_movement: 5000
energy_per_rotation: 5000

smart-inserter:
drain: 0.4 kW
energy_per_movement: 7000
energy_per_rotation: 7000

So every inserter has a drain of 0.4 kilo Watts.

I do not quite understand the value of energy per movement/rotation, but I guess this is dependend on how long and fast the inserter has to strech out. See here: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 057#p35057

Maybe someone could enlighten me.

Wow... really nice post. Thank you for the research!

Those results... this seems strange to the point of asking: is this "working as designed"?