Help with design so coal loaders load coal

[Serpardum]

I ran into a situation where I was using all my energy to fight biters constantly (trying to take out a huge nest with around 60 laser turrets) and my energy grid went down. I ran back to my base (quite a ways away) and to my burners to see that there was plenty of fuel but all the boilers were empty. My conclusion is that so much electricity was being used for the laser turrets that the inserters didn't have enough power to load fuel, and so eventually all my burners went dry. This is not good.

is there some type of design I can do where my coal inserters get power priority?

The only design I can think of is having one set of generators only supply the fuel inserters and is what I'm going to do until I can come up with a better solution

[FishSandwich]

I think the only thing you can do, as you already said is to give the inserters a dedicated power source.

I don't think there is any other way to do it, not yet at least.

[BurnHard]

You can build some accus that are in a seperate network that only power the inserters but gets power from the regular engines. Too complicated to describe in detail but I think you can figure it out.

[BurnHard]

Here, I made a quick setup and screenshot for you

[Serpardum]

Right, that's what I wound up doing, where the generators closest to the inserters supply the burners and the rest of the generators supply the system. This works, but is not optimal, as I'm using approximately 1 generator for 4 inserters or so. Which means the rest of my network doesn't get as much power and I"m going to have to make more generators As it is I already have 40 generators. Getting ready to throw up another 8 now

I find 10 burners usually supply enough heat to run 8 generators but sometimes not, so I supply 11 for peak demands

[FishSandwich]

It seems that even with BurnHard's design, if the accumulators run out of energy(as unlikely as that is considering how much power inserters use) you'll be in the same situation.

Seems the dedicated power supply is the only solution at the moment.

[Serpardum]

It seems that even with BurnHard's design, if the accumulators run out of energy(as unlikely as that is considering how much power inserters use) you'll be in the same situation.

Seems the dedicated power supply is the only solution at the moment.

Actually, BurnHard's design is using a dedicated power supply. If you look at the power pole closest to the top it's area touches the bottom generator, so gets power from there. As long as fuel is in the burners the inserters will have power to put fuel in the burners no matter what the rest of the power grid looks like

On a new game I set one generator a little away from the rest so that it was easier to isolate the power lines and only have to use one generator for my burner inserters which is plently.

[rk84]

Here is another design to test
It uses burner inserters to load fuel in boilers and long inserters to load burner inserters.

[FishSandwich]

It seems that even with BurnHard's design, if the accumulators run out of energy(as unlikely as that is considering how much power inserters use) you'll be in the same situation.

Seems the dedicated power supply is the only solution at the moment.

Actually, BurnHard's design is using a dedicated power supply. If you look at the power pole closest to the top it's area touches the bottom generator, so gets power from there. As long as fuel is in the burners the inserters will have power to put fuel in the burners no matter what the rest of the power grid looks like

What? The top left pole is connecting the bottom right generator to the rest of the base(I'm assuming this from BurnHard's description) so its not dedicated. Then there are the poles on a separate circuit powering the inserters and the accumulators. But once you start firing your laser turrets and that generator starts powering only those, your inserters will rely on the accumulators only for power. All I'm saying that as unlikely as it is, if you had your laser turrets going non stop for however long it'd take, your accumulators would run out of power and the inserters would stop and you'd have the same situation that you had in your first post.

On a new game I set one generator a little away from the rest so that it was easier to isolate the power lines and only have to use one generator for my burner inserters which is plently.

This is what I'm saying is the only solution right now.

[BurnHard]

In my design the bottom left generator powers both the accus (and inserters) AND the main power grid. So no dedicated generator, the one generator is in the area of two power poles that are not connected to each other.

The only case the inserters would stop: After a loooong time of energy starvation (15 minutes or even way more) on the whole grid with not one single short time of energy surplus. Inserters on their own need VERY low amount of electrical energy. Accus get immediately recharged in short times of energy surplus.

But really... in midgame I have tons of accus and solar, maybe one row of 10 steam generators for backup... The generators are soo cheap to build, energy should never be a problem really. One I have automated the ingredients for accus i build 100 for the beginning, midgame I have about 1000 accus and solars. Endgame open End. Coal and solid fuel becomes useless at that stage anyways.

[FishSandwich]

Not saying your design wouldn't work, obviously it would and the chances of the accumulators running out of power is probably 1 in a million. The only point I'm making here is that a dedicated power supply is the only way to guarantee that the inserters won't run out of power.

[BurnHard]

I would call it dedicaded with a twist

The bottom left generator is the first in line from the burners. As long the inserters work, the generator will always transfer power to the accus and to the inserters = Working under all circumstances. But with the advantage, that all power the generator produces and which is not used by the inserters, goes to the main grid instead of letting the generator idle at 5% load.

But jeah, thats just playing around, as we said generators, boilers etc are that cheap to build within seconds. I am checking my electric networks every minute and just build some generators in advance, so that I never come into that situation of energy starvation