Factorio Forums

It would be nice to have a daylight sensor for the circuit network so you are able to automaticly shut things down during the night to safe power.
This way you can midgame protect yourself more against black outs.

You can build that sensor by yourself.
You need solar panel, two tanks with water (need a little water, not full), small pump nad combinators.
Connect tanks together and pump water from one tank to another. Pump have to be powered by solar panel.
During day, water from tank 1 will by pumped faster then moved back from tank 2 so tank 1 will have less water then tank 2. At night pump will not work and water level will be eventually equal in both tanks. Connect tanks with combinators and set conditions to detect day/night cycle.

Very clever i must admit, however the suggestion is mostly used for mid game problems when you are starting out. Your plan requires electric engines wich you will produce once the black outs will no longer be a real problem

Then you can build power detector
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=23604#p148095

If i remember correctly, combinators are available pretty fast.

In 0.12 it's not easy to shut things down without spending a lot of resources on the ability to shut them down . You pretty much have to use smart inserters to stop feeding resources into assemblers/furnances, so they stop processing. But smart inserters are actually pretty expensive early on and it'd probably work out cheaper to just spend those resources on a bit more steam power.

In 0.13 we'll get a power switch which makes this easier along with improved ability to turn off all sorts of things. It'll be particularly easy to detect low power, for example checking if an accumulation is < 99%

Neotix wrote:Then you can build power detector
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=23604#p148095

If i remember correctly, combinators are available pretty fast.

Gonna try this, thnx!

Hi there,

I built a daylight sensor which is more precise using combinators and a solar panel only.

See here if you are interested: viewtopic.php?f=193&t=77046&p=462595#p462595
cheers