Power production
The Electric network and Liquid network have many boundary points, when thinking for energy production. This page collects this points.
Building up power production
How many pumps and burners are needed?
One offshore pump supports 13 (99% max load) or 14 (100% load) boilers and 10 steam engines. Each steam engine needs roughly 1.31 boilers when running at full capacity.
Hot water from boilers can also be stored in storage tanks and used by extra steam engines during peak times or during night (if solar is in place). This energy storage technique can be used instead of or in addition to accumulators.
Forum thread on the requirements of pumps, burners, and steam engines: http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3094.
Producing enough energy? Checklist
- Did you connect the steam engine to the Electric network? If not, a flash is blinking (to show, that it is not connected). Add some Power poles near the steam engines that go to machines needing that power.
- Did you build up your liquid network as described in the Liquid network basics?
- Do you have enough pumps? You need 1 pump for every 9 steam engines. It doesn't make sense to have more than 3 pumps, as the pipes cannot transport more water.
- Does your liquid network has water? Look at the glass windows! Place two pipes after the last steam engine, to use it as a water sensor.
- Do you have enough Boilers? The water temperature should reach 100 degrees. One of your burners should be reserve (not used, no lights in the burner) when you need to restart the energy system.
More usages of the accumulators
Reduce energy consumption in critical times
Accumulators can be used to limit the need for power for some parts of your factory.
There are naturally 3 items, which are good candidates for that:
How does it work?
An accumulator has a lower delivery priority than any other power-using entity, this guarantees, that it receives only energy, when you have enough. At the same time it can deliver energy in another electric network. Both facts together works in this case as a regulated transformer and delivers only energy into other networks, if you are producing enough. Or in other words: in a power shortage, only the unimportant parts of your factory stop - not the whole factory.
This is fine if you want to guarantee that basic functions of your factory keep working (lasers, ammo production, very dependent on your priorities) no matter how much power usage you add.
This especially makes sense for radars - the radar explores new parts of the map, and consumes a large amount of energy. It makes sense to limit it, because when you are low on energy exploring is the least important thing.
In general this is a technique which works well only when you just researched accumulators and solar panels, but don't have enough resources to build big solar farms and accumulator farms.
- todo : pics from a radar station, research labs and electric furnace behind an accu. -
Minimizing need for Steam power
Order of with accu connected networks
http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4814
Ways to store energy
When it is about storing energy for later there are two questions:
- Which technology level is needed?
- How much afford to built the structure up?
Dependent of the current technology-level this is a list of how you can store energy:
- Principle: Adding lots of pipes and use much more steam-engines as really needed. Pipes store some energy, of course very little, but much enough to handle short energy drops of some seconds. In every case the over-usage of your energy production might be easier visible, if clever planned.
- As soon as you have oil-tanks, you can store quite significant amounts of hot water in them. See this article.
- This techniques stretches the time you can burn coal for you energy need, but sooner or later you will switch to accumulators. See Solar Farming.
- Sooner or later you will also switch of the steam engines, when you don't need them.
- With small pumps you can control the flow of water. See below.
How to switch off steam engines in the night, when enough accumulator capacity is available?
This has been moved to Power production/Dealing with priorities
Producers and consumers priorities
What can be seen from the electric network info?
The Electric network info GUI can be accessed by left-clicking any electric pole nearby.
You can see only the info from the electric network where that pole is connected to! Unlike the production-info (press P) the electric network info is not globally measured, but by network.
- Consumption - What are the current consumption demands. This bar should always be full. Otherwise, it means your production is too low compared to the needed consumption.
- Production - What is the current production amount. This bar should never be full. Otherwise, it means you are at the limit of your power-production.
- Accumulator capacity - How much power is currently held inside of all your accumulators combined in joule. For quick understanding: 1J = 1W * 1sec, see also wikipedia:Joule
- Timespan - Set the time span for the graphs below
- Detailed Consumption - A list of consumers from highest power consumption to lowest. In the picture example, you can see that 2 oil refineries take the most power, at 431 kW.
- Detailed Production - A list of producers from highest power production to lowest. In the picture example, you can see that only 9 Steam engines produce all the electricity in the factory.
- Consumption Graph - Shows the consumption of the different parts of your factory over time. You can choose the timespan as detailed in #4 above.
- Production Graph - Shows the production of the different producers of your factory over time. You can choose the timespan as detailed in #4 above.
Note, that the timeframe influences the shown detailed production/consumption: the displayed watts is the summed up watts in the timeframe (in the graph below) divided by steps of that timeframe. This means you can see the consumption of radars, even if you mined them meanwhile.
How to set poles?
- covering, rules with the length between poles etc. - todo -
How to drag electric wires myself?
All wires can be removed from an electric pole by shift-left clicking it. Electric (copper) wires and logistic wires can be manually placed by left clicking the wire on both the electric poles desired.
Placing electric poles while shift is held down will place it without any connecting wires.
How to slow down research/production?
- Mainly about using different networks, networks connected with accus to limit power - todo -
Solar Farming
http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1865
Liquid network
There are some points, which can show you, what needs or can be changed in the liquid network:
- If your steam engines can keep up 510 W of output during heavy load (when electric poles display satisfaction below 100%), it is safe to add more engines.
- If an engine displays a temperature below 100 degrees, add more boilers.
- If you look into the engines and the available energy is below 100%, add boilers/pumps or add a new line to your power plant.
- If needed energy is much below the available energy, all is fine.
- There are also tricks to avoid using too much power. See Electric network.
Storing hot water
http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3724