power switch at night solar / accumulators / steam

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Minicheum
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power switch at night solar / accumulators / steam

Post by Minicheum »

Hello everyone,
I began a few days ago and I started to reach the stage of the game where I sarted making accumulators.
Up until now I had both a steam and a solar power source.
The solar panel production is fully automated so I could go nuts on the solar panel field, but the accumulators are not quite yet.
When I started planting accumulators, I noticed an issue:
The solar panels would provide energy through the day, then the steam would take over at night, and accumulators would remain untouched.

So i began fiddling with the power switches.
My idea was to have solar power during the day, then live an accumulators, and pop up the old steam power once that was used up.
I separated properly my steam power line, my accumulators, and my factory. Then I tried cut my steam power line until the accumulator charge would go down below 10%.
That was awfull: during the night, when accumulator power was going down, the steam engines started rolling and began recharging the accumulators !

I spent some time on it, tried looking on the forum and here is the solution I decided on
power.png
power.png (874.03 KiB) Viewed 7758 times
I am using the accumulator on the left as reference, it is attached to my accumulator field electric system.
A. When that accumulator charge goes down below 10% I want to activate the steam engines, and disconnect the accumulators to prevent them from recharging.
B. There is a single power pole on the top right that serves as a day/night indicator. The accumulator there would go to 0% quickly at night and then recharge during the morning. This is the cue for me to disconnect the steam engines, and plug the accumulators back in to let the solar power recharge them.
The 2 conditions are added by a combinator A + B -> C
Then power relays are set with a mutually exclusive condition: accumulators are in if C > 10 % and steam engines are in if C =< 10 %.

Qon
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Re: power switch at night solar / accumulators / steam

Post by Qon »

Minicheum wrote:
Mon Apr 22, 2019 9:52 pm
That was awfull: during the night, when accumulator power was going down, the steam engines started rolling and began recharging the accumulators !
I don't see the problem. If steam is on when accumulators are < 10% and steam charges the accumulators when it turns on then that just means that it will turn off again a short while later. And it also means you have enough steam power to actually keep your base on with just steam and won't brown out or get a power death spiral. Cutting off your accumulators is solving a non-problem. Just don't.

I made a topic about Actually reliable solar. before. You could hook up steam to it (turn on instead of turning low priority grid off) and maybe turn the low priority grid off if accumulator goes even further down. Then your steam can charge your accumulators to 100% during the day (but only if solar panels are not enough) and steam can turn on earlier if necessary during the night if steam is also not enough to together with accumulator charge.

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TheRangerLOL
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Re: power switch at night solar / accumulators / steam

Post by TheRangerLOL »

I think you're making it a little more complicated than it needs to be, unless I'm misunderstanding something.

Here's what I did.

Factorio Accumulator Controller.png
Factorio Accumulator Controller.png (785.01 KiB) Viewed 6693 times

Red wire is hooked up to my base grid, which is bringing in the Accumulator signal.

Green Decider is set to Accumulator < 25% for me, and if true, outputs a 1 on Green.

Green goes to power switch and an LED. Power switch connects when Green signal = 1. The LED is just aesthetic, and tells me when Steam Power is running (which never happens since I went all solar). In theory, these green lights can be placed all around the base if you want to know when steam is on or not.

Voila! :) Hope this works for you.

Oh and here's an Accumulator Power Meter i was about to post somewhere else, but i think you might find it useful so i'll post it here as well:

Accumulator Meter.png
Accumulator Meter.png (327.27 KiB) Viewed 6693 times

So, apparently I can't post blueprints because i'm working on v14.23 (yes, i know), so I'll just drop a link here.
Edit- Posted link
The one and only.

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