Factorio Forums

As of right now, you have to left click the burner inserter and insert 1 unit of fuel in order to jump start it before it can begin to gather its own fuel, this is not an efficient method of early game manual labor. Most manual furnace/dril fueling techniques do not require you to open the interface window to interact with it, but the burner inserter initially does. What I suggest is that the burner inserter starts with an energy budget of about 180 kJ, enough to get it started.

Also, when you change the fuel type, it will not change by itself, so you have to kickstart again with the new fuel type (say, when switching from coal to solid fuel.)
That could probably be improved

doesnt it just inject some new energy to the energy budget when it burns the last unit of old fuel, at which point it has an empty slot to load new fuel into? I just let my old fuel needy structures burn through the coal.