Burner Inserter help?

[Silver Ferret]

Can you use it to grab ore from a wooden chest, to put into a smelter?

[Fel]

You can but it's often better to skip the burner inserters.
For example, putting your furnace at the exit tile of the burner mining drill so the ores go directly in it instead.

The reason is because the burner inserters are not exactly cheap and the aim at the start of the game is to get the electricity going so you can start automating and researching.

[Silver Ferret]

Originally posted by Fel:

You can but it's often better to skip the burner inserters.
For example, putting your furnace at the exit tile of the burner mining drill so the ores go directly in it instead.

The reason is because the burner inserters are not exactly cheap and the aim at the start of the game is to get the electricity going so you can start automating and researching.

Thank you!

[Nonotorious]

Yeah i have never once used burner inserters in my 2.5k hrs playing. They have never seemed worth it and getting proper miners/building stuff is more important resource wise.

[Fel]

They can be worth using for feeding the boilers since they don't need electricity so they would continue to put coal at the same rate even if the electricity supply can't meet the demand.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

I only use them for boilers for the reasons Fel listed. Otherwise they work exactly the same as any other inserter only they are the slowest and require fuel.

[walter]

Originally posted by Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia:

I only use them for boilers for the reasons Fel listed. Otherwise they work exactly the same as any other inserter only they are the slowest and require fuel.

This (and what Fel said).

[ShutEye_DK]

Originally posted by Kemal:

Is it more coal efficient to use burner inserters for boilers instead of using powered insterters though?

No. Burner inserters use 94.2kW, Inserters use 13.6kW (and drains 400W). So apart from initial cost, Burner Inserters uses a LOT more coal (Joule).

[Peter]

Aside from one burner inserter to ensure your fuel-powered burners keep going I use them for destroying trees. Four boxes, with four burner inserters in a circular pattern, is a great place to get rid of wood in your inventory. Eventually the wood that gets passed around gets consumed by the inserters as fuel. If you have more wood than the boxes will hold then just add another pair of boxes and inserters.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Peter:

Aside from one burner inserter to ensure your fuel-powered burners keep going I use them for destroying trees. Four boxes, with four burner inserters in a circular pattern, is a great place to get rid of wood in your inventory. Eventually the wood that gets passed around gets consumed by the inserters as fuel. If you have more wood than the boxes will hold then just add another pair of boxes and inserters.

That just creates pollution without getting anything in return. If pollution is a concern you are better off just dumping surplus wood into a box that will eventually feed a boiler and at least create power for producing that pollution.

[Halliwax]

One burner inserter to jump-start your boilers after an outage might maybe be worthwhile. No need to do it for all of them, the first boiler will start up all the regular inserters, even if they're browning out and move slowly.

For a while I thought they might make sense for feeding turrets from an ammo belt, that way your defenses are less dependent on your power grid. But the burner inserters have a critical flaw that make them much less reliable even if (for some reason) you can't keep your electric grid steadily on: if they run out of fuel and there's a gap in the goal feed, they'll just stop. They don't reserve enough power to refuel themselves, so you will need to manually refuel them at that point. That makes them never ever worthwhile unless it's part of some challenge handicapping yourself.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Halliwax:

One burner inserter to jump-start your boilers after an outage might maybe be worthwhile. No need to do it for all of them, the first boiler will start up all the regular inserters, even if they're browning out and move slowly.

For a while I thought they might make sense for feeding turrets from an ammo belt, that way your defenses are less dependent on your power grid. But the burner inserters have a critical flaw that make them much less reliable even if (for some reason) you can't keep your electric grid steadily on: if they run out of fuel and there's a gap in the goal feed, they'll just stop. They don't reserve enough power to refuel themselves, so you will need to manually refuel them at that point. That makes them never ever worthwhile unless it's part of some challenge handicapping yourself.

If one boiler doesn't produce enough power to run your coal miners and the other electric inserters you'll never get out of brownout stage unless you manually stoke enough of the boilers to get the power all the way back on.

[CalhounMKZ]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Originally posted by Halliwax:

One burner inserter to jump-start your boilers after an outage might maybe be worthwhile. No need to do it for all of them, the first boiler will start up all the regular inserters, even if they're browning out and move slowly.

For a while I thought they might make sense for feeding turrets from an ammo belt, that way your defenses are less dependent on your power grid. But the burner inserters have a critical flaw that make them much less reliable even if (for some reason) you can't keep your electric grid steadily on: if they run out of fuel and there's a gap in the goal feed, they'll just stop. They don't reserve enough power to refuel themselves, so you will need to manually refuel them at that point. That makes them never ever worthwhile unless it's part of some challenge handicapping yourself.

If one boiler doesn't produce enough power to run your coal miners and the other electric inserters you'll never get out of brownout stage unless you manually stoke enough of the boilers to get the power all the way back on.

That's why you set up a logic circuit on the power grid to turn off the factory if a brownout occurs. So that the miners can get caught up on supplying boilers.

[Fel]

This can be a very dangerous thing to do depending on what caused te brownout and what your defenses use.

For example, if your defenses are laser turrets and they are the cause of the brownout, odds are that you don't want to cut them off or that would mean that the enemies would be allowed to breach your walls, destroy your turrets and access your factory to cause chaos there.

A different case would be if it's your production that draws too much power and causes the brownout, it would be a near-permanent state of just the coal miners and the boilers being powered until you fix it.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by CalhounMKZ:

That's why you set up a logic circuit on the power grid to turn off the factory if a brownout occurs. So that the miners can get caught up on supplying boilers.

You don't really have to do that. Boilers only consume coal to make power when you need the power. All you have to do is make sure that you have more than enough boilers to supply all your power needs, adequate coal or solid fuel to power them (you can buffer the boilers with a chest if you are worried about a possible brown out), and the boilers will limit themselves. Circuit network control is only really needed for accumulators and nuclear power
if you don't want to waste fuel rods by over producing power.

[RiO]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Circuit network control is only really needed for accumulators and nuclear power
if you don't want to waste fuel rods by over producing power.

Kind of a hot take, maybe, but it's almost universally wrong to apply circuit control to nuclear power as well.

There are a few reasons to validate that point.

Firstly: shutting down your reactors via circuit control means heat pipes will cool down. Once your reactors have to reactivate due to a sudden spike in power demand, it'll take time to heat them back up again.

That has two nasty consequences in and of itself.
Primarily, you're burning off part of your nuclear fuel cells on reheating all the pipes running to your heat exchangers back to 500 degrees and that's basically a 100% loss, because exchangers produce zero steam until they hit at least 500 degrees. So really, the net resource gain in shutting your reactors down - if any - is marginal as you have a built-in 100% loss when doing so and they have to start back up.

Secondarily, if your reactors can't get heat flowing in time before your stored steam runs out, then you'll hit a brown out. And if you have a large base powered solely by nuclear, that will be a very, very, VERY deep brown out which will not be fun to recover from. Consider that pumps keeping the water pressurized as it flows to your exchangers, require power. This is basically the inserters-providing-coal problem; except worse because you can't run by and manually insert water, as it's a fluid that needs piping.

Secondly: unless you go gung-ho on your uranium stocks by turning the entire landscape into a smoldering radioactive hellscape as you nuke biters out of existence with atomic bombs, you will never run out of U-235. Ever. It's statistically impossible. So why even bother with the effort of adding meticulous managed circuit control to your reactor setup? Especially considering the existence of the detriments to such an approach, as I wrote before.