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Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

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Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Wed Feb 19, 2025 5:40 am
by datarza
144 kW it seems like a lot coal burned for nothing

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Wed Feb 19, 2025 7:08 am
by boskid
But look at how overpowered they are, they have no drain consumption.

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Wed Feb 19, 2025 4:31 pm
by datarza
And how I have to look? The big power consumption removes any benefits of burner inserter. There is the differences:

Without burner inserters:
02-19-2025, 11-29-55.png
02-19-2025, 11-29-55.png (69.95 KiB) Viewed 1176 times
With burner inserters:
02-19-2025, 11-30-06.png
02-19-2025, 11-30-06.png (65.05 KiB) Viewed 1176 times
In the past they were good for using with boilers, but now there is no benefits.

The test blueprint:
02-19-2025, 11-33-33.png
02-19-2025, 11-33-33.png (2.03 MiB) Viewed 1174 times

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Wed Feb 19, 2025 5:01 pm
by computeraddict
datarza wrote: Wed Feb 19, 2025 4:31 pm The big power consumption removes any benefits of burner inserter.
In the past they were good for using with boilers, but now there is no benefits.
They were always worse than electric inserters for power consumption. Their benefit of preventing brown out power spirals without setting up a secondary electrical grid still exists.

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Wed Feb 19, 2025 7:16 pm
by Muche
Burner inserters also don't freeze, so now they can also fulfill similar role with heating on Aquilo as well.

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2025 10:45 am
by Wockes
Muche wrote: Wed Feb 19, 2025 7:16 pm Burner inserters also don't freeze, so now they can also fulfill similar role with heating on Aquilo as well.
I didn't know that! Now I finally have a use for all my legendary burner inserters I've made out of boredom.

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2025 7:55 pm
by datarza
Muche wrote: Wed Feb 19, 2025 7:16 pm Burner inserters also don't freeze, so now they can also fulfill similar role with heating on Aquilo as well.
where did you see Aquilo in this thread or other spaceage mention?

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2025 8:13 pm
by Muche
datarza wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2025 7:55 pm
Muche wrote: Wed Feb 19, 2025 7:16 pm Burner inserters also don't freeze, so now they can also fulfill similar role with heating on Aquilo as well.
where did you see Aquilo in this thread or other spaceage mention?
I was pointing out a behaviour that burner inserters have that may balance their power consumption, which is the topic of this thread.
If the topic at hand is strictly about their base non-SA behaviour, it may have been useful to mention that, and my remark served for clarifying that.

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2025 11:03 pm
by torne
datarza wrote: Wed Feb 19, 2025 4:31 pm And how I have to look? The big power consumption removes any benefits of burner inserter. There is the differences:
Yes, if you only supply the exact amount of fuel needed by the boilers themselves then you won't have enough fuel to also supply the burner inserters while still running the boilers at 100%, and you'll produce less power than you expected. If you supply more fuel then you will generate the full 60MW, but you will have to mine about 1.7% more coal.

The benefit of burner inserters is that they don't need electricity and so using them to supply your boilers ensures they keep producing the same amount of power even in severe brownout conditions, making it much less likely to spiral into a full blackout.

You are also testing the worst case here:

1. The "overhead" of using burner inserters goes down significantly if you use denser fuels, because each swing of the inserter always uses the same amount of power, but transports *more energy* each time, and it also goes down as you research increased inserter stack size for the same reason. If you move to using solid fuel and have researched stack size 3 then the burner inserter can put ~534 solid fuel into a boiler while only consuming 1 solid fuel itself, which means it's costing less than 0.2% of your fuel in order to avoid brownout spiralling.

2. Since burner inserters don't use any power while idle, their efficiency stays the same regardless of whether the boilers are running at full power or not. Electric inserters are less efficient when doing less work. So, if your boilers are under-utilized (because you built more than you need, or because you have other sources of power covering most of the load, or because the boilers are a backup power system that isn't running at all most of the time) then this small idle power drain slowly adds up over time, and if you expect your boilers to be used rarely enough then it might actually be more efficient to use burner inserters (especially if you are using dense fuel and a high stack size as in the previous point).

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2025 6:30 am
by datarza
torne, I know perfectly well how the burner inserter works, where and how it can be used. There is no point in wasting your time describing elementary things, especially since what you said is not entirely correct. Please read the subject of topic, here is about decreasing the power consumption of burner inserter and not about how to use it.

Special for you, just inform, burner inserter is good to use only in three cases: loading fuel into `boilers`, loading fuel into `locomotives` and loading fuel and ore into `stone furnace` at beginning of the game (do not mess with `Steel furnace`). Other cases, like "keep producing the same amount of power even in severe brownout conditions" are very questionable. To be honest, I am not talking about locomotives, where the benefits of using burner insert have diminished not so big, but the increased power consumption has reduced the usings of burner inserters as inserters in general, especially at beginning of the game. Looks like burner inserter was not popular at all, but now their benefits was decreased more and I do not clear see why.

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2025 2:40 am
by Muche
Burner inserters' power consumption has not changed in v2.0.
It's still 50 kJ per action, same as in v1.1, 10 times of inserter's consumption of 5 kJ per action.
Yes, it shows as increased from 94.2 kW to 144 kW, because it was sped up (extension speed by 64%, rotation speed by 30%).

As torne hinted at, comparing inserter's constant drain + lower consumption vs. burner inserter's higher consumption means there is a point under which it is more efficient to use burners.
My napkin-estimate is roughly one swing per game-day.
Using your examples, it's backup boilers and locomotives in low throughput cases (at most 2% time spent travelling on coal; 98% time spent in stations; with solid fuel it's about 8% + 92%; rocket fuel might be on par, would have to test that).
Early smelting could fall into low utilization case as well.

Also, it seems you haven't even tried to place your blueprint.
Otherwise you would have discovered that subsetup which uses burner inserters autostarts. Subsetup which uses inserters does not.
Which is another advantage of burner inserters you failed to notice. It seems your knowledge of burner inserters is less than your claimed perfect.

Your blueprint also doesn't measure input fuel at all and is not large enough to test solid fuel or rocket fuel.
You might want to try something like this (although still not large enough for rocket fuel tests):

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2025 4:58 am
by datarza
It sems that you have no clue what are you talking about.

Increased consumption means that burner inserter spends more power for move item and it does not matter of his speed. Before 2.0 burner inserter used less fuel for doing same job, and nobody take care about his speed because it is very specific item in the game, it does not used for speed, it is used for loading something very rare and not drain power when idle.

`Otherwise you would have discovered that subsetup which uses burner inserters autostarts` - repeat once again, this use-case is questionable. If you carefully played games on early stage, probably you not, and if you meet low-power situation several times, you may notice that this "subsetup" does not work or work very lazy. And good solution is not burner inserters with boilers, but completely prevent the low-power situation and control how many boilers do you have and how many powers you need. And other red sign, which shows that you do not know the subject, it is where burner inserters should be placed. And correct placement is not only attached to boilers, but placed together with `burner mining drill` exactly after electric mining drills. Or somewhere together with chest that collects fuel and stores it specially for that case. You have to read this wiki before say something.

Repeat again, this thread is not about use-case of burner inserter. How to use burner inserter is not related to his power consumption. And if you have only that use-case argument and nothing new, then goodbye, I do not repeat my answers to silly things.

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2025 7:21 am
by Muche
Burner inserter definitions-abridged
Please point out to me where it says it spends more energy, because I do not see it.
Bonus points for you, if you know the formula for calculating maximum consumption of an inserter (i.e. the topic of this thread).
its this

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2025 1:29 pm
by fencingsquirrel
Datarza, the speed is relevant because it directly means less joules used, which means less coal is used (fuel's power is measured in joules). Watts, and by extenions kw, are joules per second, so the speed is very relevant. Less seconds in the swing, means less joules used up in coal.

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2025 3:59 am
by datarza
moderator, please close this topic, anyway you will do nothing, as usual, and a bunch of noobs just open their mouths in vain

Re: Please, decrease power consumption for burner inserter

Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2025 4:14 am
by computeraddict
datarza wrote: Mon Feb 24, 2025 3:59 am moderator, please close this topic, anyway you will do nothing, as usual, and a bunch of noobs just open their mouths in vain
Have you actually tested their continuous drain in 1.1 vs 2.0?
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