Aquilo Brown-Out

[megamagicmonkey]

So my Aquilo setup is still small, but hefty enough that restarting it could be very difficult without some prerequisites. In this case, the worst thing happened. The water intake for my steam emptied and so the turbines got nothing. Even if I bring ice into the processor now, the natural power demand is way too high to process it, and I'm off planet to boot. This mostly happened because my ammonia tanks filled out and ice production halted. I tried to see if I could purge the tanks automatically on some kind of input, but seemingly no.

So two questions. How should I reboot my factory? I'm sure I'm going to need to visit in person. Just a ton of solar panels or something? Then, how do I prevent this from happening? Best I can think of is a ton of fluid tanks to increase the timespan and then purge it every so often.

[megamagicmonkey]

I think at least for a safety feature I'll tie in some accumulators with a power switch between the factory grid and its own self. Once charged I can flip the power switch to offer emergency power to reboot the grid. Doesn't answer my two questions, but it's a good backup.

[zerassar]

I overlooked my fuel demands exceeding supply and hit a spiral downwards.
I had to ship barrels of water and rocket fuel there to get it restarted.

[Nero]

Are you running nuclear?
Otherwise you would have a good ammonia dump with solid fuel.
Its also possible to ship ice from Fulgora (lol) or make a stationary platform in orbit (don’t forget the rockets) for ice collection.
For restart you can drop a few solars and isolate the grid (only power the must have sectors) as well as import water barrels (if you are desperate)

Btw, a tank of 500C steam stores the power of 485 normal accumulators on a fraction of the footprint.

[AlexMBrennan]

Then, how do I prevent this from happening?

The easy solution is to use a programmable speaker to remind you to press the "empty tank" button.

The intended solution is to burn more solid fuel.

[megamagicmonkey]

That steam tank idea is a pretty good one. Toss down a pump, and pipe excess into a reserve tank, then if things go bad point it the other way.

I managed to get it back up, and thankfully before the heating towers cooled down too much. Got solar and accumulators to gather enough charge to power a single isolated chemical plant. Supplied it some ice from my platform, piped it into the main system, and then it kicked back on from there. I managed it in such a way that the accumulators quickly recharged from a connection to a turbine while still keeping it off the main grid. Put some ice in chest next to my emergency plant with an inserter that is currently disabled. If it happens again I can boot it back up remotely.

And the solid fuel dump is a good idea. It took a lot to get everything heated up and resources were thin so I regulated input to only supply if heat was below 900 degrees. I'm keeping that on my fringe stuff because I don't want to just plow through my supply as I make it, but I did take the limiters off two of my cooling towers so it should be able to drain off ammonia indefinitely now. Just in case though I added like 20 tanks to its holdings and will purge it manually if it gets too full.

[megamagicmonkey]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

Then, how do I prevent this from happening?

The easy solution is to use a programmable speaker to remind you to press the "empty tank" button.

The intended solution is to burn more solid fuel.

This is genuinely brilliant.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by megamagicmonkey:

That steam tank idea is a pretty good one. Toss down a pump, and pipe excess into a reserve tank, then if things go bad point it the other way.

Use 2 pumps one facing each direction and then use the circuit network to turn on the one that needs to be on at the same time it turns off the other one.