Help-consume solid fuel if excess, or stay on coal

[Eternal]

Hello, I'm struggling to make a case to work... on the model of oil, where u activate the pump to make solid fuel of off gas in case gas tank over 20k (which is simple), i want to do similar with coal vs solid fuel. When solid fuel is in excess (cause im a builder not a ratio guy :D i build to have all in excess, aka saturated belts) it stops my plastic production ofc... now, i can use solid fuel on furnaces to get rid of excess, but have to constantly manually switch to coal when solid fuel is spent entirely to let rocket fuel use solid fuel as it needs, and this isn't so easy as in oil figure above. what i searched all over for is a possibility to release solid fuel belt on condition of lets say belt saturated...?!?... or hold it and release the coal till solid fuel belt gets again saturated... i hope you ppl understand what i mean, spliters cannot prioritize lets say left belt over right one according to quantity of product on belt, or i dunno how to do it. Help! :D much appreciated :)

[Twizlight]

I imagine you could rig a circuit system up to do this, but how exactly I wouldn't know. It seems that anything you can think of you can use the logic system and circuit system to do if you can figure out the way to make the systems interact. There is an example of this kind of system in use on the wiki under 'circuit cookbook', but I haven't made it actually work.

Experiment and good luck!

[Teh Freek]

Use a splitter with priority to the rocket fuel machines and the spillover to the boilers and furnaces.

[Eternal]

Hehehe me neither, my brain doesn't brain that much 😄😄😄

[Eternal]

Yeah Teh Freak, did that so far, but feels up the bus and plastic is stopped....

[Teh Freek]

Did you also set up splitters on the boilers/furnaces to prioritize the solid fuel input?

[Eternal]

Ups , i meant furnaces go without it and stop, i have it mixed with coal , in your idea... Thx for heads up, will not use somewhere else and done.

[Teh Freek]

Furnaces will prefer the fuel they're already using, so you will need to wait until they consume all reachable coal before they'll use solid fuel.

[Eternal]

Yep noticed , but , ure right, mixed with coal on a spliter will just use the whole spill ... No point in my autoswitch wannahave... I get to much fancy sometimes 😄😄😄. Thx all

[Cryoge]

It's not a good solution and requires that you use boxes and inserters, but you could use this as a basis for something better.

http://www.bilder-upload.eu/show.php?file=dec517-1522599937.jpg

Basically it works like this: The Circuit-network reads the box with the solif-fuel in it.
If there (as in this example) are more than 100 solid-fuel in it, the belt with the solid-fuel on it activates and lets it through the splitter. Your furnaces are now supplied with solid-fuel.

If you now decide to use the solid fuel for the rocket fuel, nothing will reach the upper box of where it would have gone before.
As soon as there are less than 100 solid-fuel in it, the "circuit-belt" will stop on the solif-fuel line and at the same time it will activate on the coal line.
Now your furnaces are supplied by coal.
If you now change again and the box again has more than 100 solif-fuel in it, the "circuit-belt" on the coal line will stop as before and the other one will start again.
As soon as the last coal leaves the 3 "circuit-belts" under the splitter, the inserter starts to top up solid fuel.
But this is rather unnecessary...

I don't know if it's good for anything, but it might give you an idea.

Edit: Nevermind...i´m to slow :)

[Eternal]

No no no thats what i was looking for lol, sort of oil case, thx thx for sure will be useful 😁

[luziferius]

You may use the new splitter behaviour (from 0.16): merge both solid fuel and coal using a splitter, and set input priority to the solid fuel belt. It will use solid fuel unless that runs out, at which point coal starts to fill in.

By the way: You get excess energy by using coal liquefecation and turn coal into solid fuel prior to burning it.

[Happy]

I use a buffer on my coal line to manage this sort of stuff. I have the solid fuel merge with the coal line, but used a circuit so that the solid fuel only merges if the coal buffer falls below a certain amount. That way I'm not using solid fuel unless I have a coal shortage.

You could of course do this without a buffer and instead use a circuit wire to read the contents on the coal belt directly. But I like the buffer because I also put an alarm on it so that I have plenty of time to fix my coal shortage before it actually starts impacting my power.

[꧁ logAnmalONE ꧂]

Sounds like you could use the help from KatherineOfSky mate.

[Hedning]

You can actually wire belts. If you have a solid fuel belt and a coal belt you can take a wire from the solid to the coal. Tell the solid one to read and hold and the coal one to enable/disable based on the signal from the solid fuel one.

[teravisor]

I'd use what Teh Freek was suggesting in second post (requires 0.16 or above version of factorio for splitter priorities). To be precise:
Solid fuel inputs into splitter with output priority to one side (rocket fuel line).
Second splitter inputs from remaining solid fuel splitter output (with less priority) and coal line, input priority on solid fuel. One line output to boilers.

What will happen?
If there's enough solid fuel in rocket fuel line, extra solid fuel will go to mix with coal; because coal has less priority, coal will only be mixed in if there's not enough solid fuel to fill conveyor. If there's enough solid fuel, only it will be used.