how many coal generators can i feed with 1 coal mine?

Question

So far I got 9 coal generators running and coal stills staking up on the conveyor belt (the first  and slow one, yes the one that can not keep up with the speed of the miner mk.1).

Comments

forgot to mention that I am using 1 coal mine but actually got 3 in less than 50 meters radius

Answer 1

Here's some lookup tables for node purity, miner tier, and overclocking %.

Values are the number of supported coal generators at 100% clock speed.

belt tier required from miner in parentheses (* if exact throughput)

Impure Nodes

	MK1	MK2	MK3
100%	2.7 (1)	5.4 (1*)	10.8 (2*)
150%	4.05 (1)	8.1 (2)	16.2 (3)
200%	5.4 (1*)	10.8 (2*)	21.6 (3)
250%	6.75 (2)	13.5 (3)	27 (4)

Normal Nodes

	MK1	MK2	MK3
100%	5.4 (1*)	10.8 (2*)	21.6 (3)
150%	8.1 (2)	16.2 (3)	32.4 (4)
200%	10.8 (2*)	21.6 (3)	43.2 (4)
250%	13.5 (3)	27 (4)	54 (5)

Pure Nodes

	MK1	MK2	MK3
100%	10.8 (2*)	21.6 (3)	43.2 (5)
150%	16.2 (3)	32.4 (4)	64.8 (6)
200%	21.6 (3)	43.2 (4)	86.4 (N/A)1
250%	27 (4)	54 (5)	108 (N/A)1

₁N/A means belt does not exist

Comments

The problem I have hereafter is the distribution of coal. On a pure node i have 120 coal/min. With a mk1 miner i can therefore have 10 coal generators run at 100% clock. But after drawing the splitting up for days, i cannot get to split the 120 coal down to 10 stacks of 12. Can someone tell me how to split it down?

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For things like this you can always just have a single belt with 9 spliters going down the belt into powerplants. There's no real neat way to split perfectly like this, so just having a chain will work out best for space. It will automatically sort itself out eventually as the earlier plants in this chain fill up.

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1) you don't have to do it like this. simply feed all the supported coal generators from one conveyor belt and split coal into the generators with MK1 belt. Eventually all generators will be saturated and working fine.
2) to split one 120 item per minute belt (ipm) to 10 equal 12 itm, you need the following:
incoming MK2 belt to a merger
outgoing one MK3 belt to a splitter
outgoing two MK2 belts to two splitters
out of each of these, outgoing three MK1 belts (total of 6 belts)
each of these MK1 belts will go in a splitter, and out of THESE splitters, two MK1 belts out.
That is 12 belts coming out in the end.
Wrap the external ones back to the original merger and bring them in, so that the initial merger inow bringing in the 120ipm belt, and two MK1 belts out of the last splitters.
These incoming MK1 belts will be fed back in, and the MK3 belt after th emerger will have now 140 itm, which are split again 12 way with the two of the shares going back in. Eventually the 10 remaining outgoing belts have very very close to 12itm deliveries.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/vZLYk8CG7X3r5QDq5

Answer 2

All power generators consume fuel at a slower rate if power network is not fully loaded, that's why you are able to run 9 generators with a single miner and Mk.1 belt. But if you want to know how much power you can constantly produce with a single coal node, then here's the math:

You probably have a Normal coal node which means that Miner Mk.1 @100% clock will produce 60 coal/min (and conveyor belt Mk.1 is also 60 items/min). Coal generator consumes ~11 coal/min at max load of 50 MW, so a single miner can supply 5 coal generators which gives 250 MW and you will have extra ~5 coal/min on top of that.

But you can also overclock your miner Mk.1 to 200% to produce 120 coal/min (you can overclock it to 250% for 150 coal/min but at this point it's useless as you can only transport 120 items/min with Mk.2 belt). With this you can feed up to 10 coal generators for 500 MW of power and have ~10 coal/min surplus. With those 10 coal/min you can run 11th coal generator underclocked at ~90% clock rate (additional 40-45 MW).

So, the answer is: until you unlock the conveyor belt Mk.3 the maximum constant power output you can get from a single coal node is ~540 MW.

Comments

you can also put manual miners on the same node if you want a stock of coal lying around for manual boosting ;-)

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Thank you very much fot this math and anwser, good to know this. :)

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Also, there was a great Pure node on top of a pillar mountain  that either needs some creative building or a long walk to get to fairly close the the start area, SE of the area where there's 3 iron and 2 limestone on a flat with another 2 iron raised up by the limestone and a copper nearby. (There's a mercer sphere on top of a pillar right by the 2 iron on the raised section) That one, along with a truck stop (Or a LOT of mk.2 conveyor) can transport the same as an overclocked miner mk.1 on a normal vein.

Answer 3

It depends on the purity of the node, you can divide the time it takes to burn trough 1 coal by the time it takes to mine one coal, ex a mk1 miner at impure node produces 1 coal every 2 seconds and a coal generator at 100% burns 1 every 5,4 secs so that concludes to (5,4/2) 2,7 generators out of 1 mk1 mine. from 1 belt mk1 you should be able to fuel 5,4 generators

Answer 4

Just adding to the "splitting-to-10-outlets-conundrum". I think it would work out if you split up to 12 outlets of equal flow rate by splitting 2-3-2 and then only connect the 10 coal plants (five plants per the initial 2 branches). Since all the outlets are equal in flow rate, the remaining flow for the "0.8" coal plant would create a little build-up, or back-pressure, that would take effect on all the other outlets.

To make it picture perfect, you could take the two free openings of the last branching level and lead them back to a merger with the initial incoming flow (before the first split) or after the first split to each of the two arms. Intriguing problem - let's go build an example .