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I've seen a lot of posts about "daylight sensors" before which mention solutions like having arithmetic combinators on separate power grids, or having a pair of fluid tanks with a pump between them. The problem with all of these approach is they can only detect when solar panels completely stop emitting power. I want my accumulators to get connected to the network when solar power drops below about 50% of maximum power production. Is there any way to do this?

It's extremely annoying that you can't just connect solar panels directly to the circuit network to read their power output. In fact it's pretty strange that there's no way to determine electric output of anything... But I assume there must be some clever way to work around this?

Dasmowenator wrote: Tue Apr 28, 2020 4:55 am I want my accumulators to get connected to the network when solar power drops below about 50% of maximum power production. Is there any way to do this?

Why would you want to do this ?

Most of the time one wants to connect steam engines, when accumulators are below a threshold, as a safety measure in case there wasn't enough energy in accus. In this case you can trigger a power switch when the accumulator drops at 99% or 50%. ( or enable a pump that otherwise would block the water , starving/feeding the steam engines, or the inserters feeding the boiler, or even the belt providing fuel and so on.)

Accumulators would automatically switch from charging to discharging when the energy consumption have variation so i never felt the need of having them in a different network.

Maybe this can explain why you couldn't find designs that suit your desire, because as you said we can't read directly the ouput of solar pannels, we can however make systems that reads accumulator charge, and set them up so that "it can only have 1 meaning" when charge drops, and deals with those to trigger mechanism.

In some games where i make many solar pannels for daytime and i don't have enough accumulators i just use 1 of them in the main network , to detect "night time is coming" when the charge is not 100%, then it triggers a pump that send water to steam engines, it charges the lonely accumulator to 100%, cut the pump, and until all the water is consumed it remains cut, then at some point the engines are not producing enough so the charge goes back to under 100%, the pump activate again, and so on, it "flickers", there are several ways to increase the time period between on/off, using the pump rather than a power switch is one of them, with a bit of combinator you can have the pump opened untill there is a certain amount of water in tanks, so that the time period between on/off is longer.

laser turret power spikes can give fake positive with this method.

Maybe those counts as work-around, maybe not depending on what you want/need hence why i asked the question

try something like 5 solar panels, one accumulator and a radar in an isolated grid.

The 5 panels can barely power the radar.
As soon as dusk starts the accumulator needs to power the radar because the output of the panels drops.

You also need to create logic, that recharges the accumulator the next day because the 5 solar panels wont be able to do it.

Here you go. The green wire attached to the left pole has signal X > 0 when production is below 50%.

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