Use of active provider chests

[foamy]

I use 'em regularly, but for fairly limited purposes:

1. Trash train recycling, as others have mentioned; excess gunk from builds or deconstructions get hauled back, dumped into active providers, and cycled into the lognet storage as required.
2. Mall materials that I want to store in quantities well beyond the capacity of a single chest, but without placing buffer chests (for hierarchy reasons). Usually this is landfill, since you only really need one assembler for it but I want to stockpile tens of thousands of product for big builds. Rails are another candidate.
3. Cycling out stuff that absolutely has to be emptied as first priority. This is particularly important in loop or near-loop setups: barrel cycling, nuclear cycling, various mod-added shenaniganry.

[SuicideJunkie]

Clearing nuclear waste is a good stock use.

I also use some in my cargo spaceships for SpaceEx, in situations where buffer chests don't work because the items need to be dumped on the same surface as they're produced. For example, I have combinator logic to shift empty (ex-acid) barrels from a requester (amount=1) to a steel chest at the mining site, then shift the barrels to an active provider while in flight back home so they are cleared off the ship before it departs again.

[blazespinnaker]

Nuclear waste? Is that space ex mod?

[NotRexButCaesar]

Nuclear waste? Is that space ex mod?

he means used fuel cells, at least I believe so

[blazespinnaker]

Ah, I send them to be reprocessed. AFAIK, there is no such thing as nuclear waste in vanilla

I avoid AP chests as they sometimes over use my bots. I prefer to calculate usage.

I can't really think of a valid usage for AP chests other than "no time to figure out the right thing to do".

That said, I've also stopped researching logistic systems. It feels very cheaty and anti-factorio to me, but that's a personal preference to be sure.

[SuicideJunkie]

Nuclear waste? Is that space ex mod?

he means used fuel cells, at least I believe so

Yes, this. Stock depleted fuel cells.
There are four safety interlock requirements that need to be met for my Mk2 reactor to start another fuel cycle
- One fresh fuel cell at every reactor input bin.
- Zero depleted cells at every reactor output bin.
- Steam level low enough to prevent core overheat.
- Water level high enough to prevent core overheat.

Since the reactor core is entirely enclosed by heat pipes and exchangers, those first two are blue and purple logistics bins respectively.

[Adrenalex]

I'd like to point out that there are quite a lot of mods that produce byproducts that can be recirculated into the network and active providers are one possible solutions for these. While some of the uses for these chest aren't immediately obvious in vanilla, modded factorio has a number of possibilities for them.

[qzjul]

Mining! Somebody brought that up in general, but my specific use case...

I'm one of those people who can't stand tiling over resources and leaving them there; so when I'm expanding another city block, sometimes I use this to mine out things that would be run over by rails & other infrastructure, without having to set up a full mine; especially when they're small resource quantities. Beacon & speed modules make it go away fast!

I also make excess stone route to a couple of beaconed landfill factories, and I output those to active provider chests, so when I want to landfill in a new city block area, bots will pull from a distributed network of chests, rather than all rushing to the same half a dozen bins.