Bad balancer

[zOldBulldog]

Hello, I can't figure out what is wrong with this belt balancer. It ends up pulling more from one source than the other and eventually that will mess up my trains. Could somebody help?

In case it is relevant the rail piece on the left is an unloader from the Bulk Rail Loader mod, effectively a large chest.

- The first section for each unloader simply balances the lanes.
- The second section is a standard belt balancer.

[Xorimuth]

Your underground belt is backwards

[DaleStan]

Also, I'm not sure why you're trying to re-lane-balance half of your throughput. I don't think what you have should be causing problems, but it isn't a lane balancer, as you can see if you pull items off the output belt here:

not-a-balancer.png (159.44 KiB) Viewed 621 times

The 1-to-2 lane balancers next to your inserters are correct, but all 2-to-2 lane balancers I've seen side-load onto an underneathy, like these:

balancer.png (153.57 KiB) Viewed 621 times

[zOldBulldog]

Also, I'm not sure why you're trying to re-lane-balance half of your throughput. I don't think what you have should be causing problems, but it isn't a lane balancer, as you can see if you pull items off the output belt here:not-a-balancer.png

The 1-to-2 lane balancers next to your inserters are correct, but all 2-to-2 lane balancers I've seen side-load onto an underneathy, like these:balancer.png

There are two sets of balancers that I show:

- LANE Balancers in the left 2 columns. They take the half-lane of output from the container and evenly split it among the lanes. The result is a belt with an equal amount of material on each lane. Your examples accomplish the same thing, but start with a belt that has material incoming on both belts, splits the sides then remerge them using the same basic technique. I suspect this is not where the problem lies, but I'll yield to more experienced designers.

- Second, that output is sent to the 2-to-1 BELT Balancer in the right 3 columns. This balancer I got from somewhere (not sure where) and it seems to operate on the same principle but on two belts instead of two lanes.

Hah! And I think I see the flaw, the underground belt is backwards! Going to fix that and test to see if it fixes it. If I don't reply within 24 hours it means that it got fixed.

[Tertius]

It seems you're missing a small but important thing about balancers. They can be input balanced, and they can be output balanced. An output balanced balancer tries to fully satisfy its output, no matter unevenly pulling from the input. An input balanced balancer pulls equally from all input, and if this means the output cannot be fully satisfied, so be it.

What you want is balanced pulling from two wagons (or in your case: the buffers from your mod). This means, you want an input balanced balancer behind the inserters that pull from the wagons.
Your second balancer (the one on the right) is output balanced, but not input lane balanced. It doesn't pull equally from both input lanes. If the right lane of its output is blocked somewhere downstream, it will pull only from the left lane at its input. In this case, only the left lane of your first balancer tier is consumed. Since they are not symmetric (they are mirrored), this can result in uneven pull.

The balancers DaleStan posted are input balanced. The one on the right is the smallest 1-to-1 lane balancer known and the result of years of community research about belt and lane balancing - probably the first and most discussed topic about Factorio of all time, because that's the first non trivial topic that pops up for every player.

I guess you somehow gave up on balancing, because you use a mod to buffer the wagon output instead of pulling from the wagon into buffer chests. If you output to chests, the balancing gets even more difficult, because you not even have to balance between wagons, you also have to balance between the chests within a wagon scope. By using a mod, your're trying to cheat yourself out of that challenge.

If you want to profit from community research about balancers and not deal with the specifics, you can use the widely known balancer blueprints (kind of spoiler for players who want to figure it out theirselves, but huge time saver if you don't want to engineer again what has been engineered before):

Raynquists Belt Balancer Compendium

Github:
https://github.com/raynquist/balancer/t ... blueprints
Organized:
https://factoriobin.com/post/Y5h0w60K

An approach for a direct solution for your setup can be this:
You have 2 wagons to unload, so unload one wagon to one belt lane only and the other wagon to the other belt lane only. Then use the 1-to-1 lane balancer from DaleStan to balance. It will pull equally from both wagons, because each wagon fills only one lane and the balancer is a lane balancer and it's input balanced.

[SoShootMe]

You have 2 wagons to unload, so unload one wagon to one belt lane only and the other wagon to the other belt lane only. Then use the 1-to-1 lane balancer from DaleStan to balance.

Unless I'm missing something, a single splitter is sufficient. Unload both wagons to the same lane of two belts, connect those belts to the inputs, and side-load one output to the other.

[FuryoftheStars]

I use the same type of balancers as zOldBulldog does, but that's primarily because the "proper" lane balancers with the side inserting to undergrounds annoy me with the resources that will never get used. I also don't care if they are propery input or output balanced. They do what I want and that's sufficient.

[zOldBulldog]

Hurray! It worked!

Here is an example with 4 wagons, 2 input-balanced lane balancers followed by 1 output-balanced lane balancer... resulting in a full belt while keeping the wagon output equal. (NOTE: I also have the Even Distribution mod installed, I'm not sure if that is also helping)

[zOldBulldog]

And an even better "everything" (both input and output) lane balancer.
- This one is more compact.
- Works for 1 or 2 belts.
- The piece from the splitter down that is just under and touching the underground belt is a 1 or 2 belt input-balanced lane balancer.
- The piece from that same splitter up is a 1 or 2 belt output-balanced lane balancer.