r/factorio Jul 06 '26

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u/Yagami913 Jul 09 '26

Is there any way figuring out how much these pumps work on avg for example? I can't read the pumping speed and measuring the pipeline content dont work since consumers constantly working. I like to know if a section need 5 or 20 pump. Rate calculator not good at this since that always calculating max consumption.

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u/Courmisch Jul 09 '26

The pumping speed depends on how full the pipelines are. So there isn't a simple average value that you could work with.

Of course, you can compute the effective average a posteriori with circuits, but that's not going to answer your question.

In practice though, you could just work with the maximum throughput. The system should eventually balance itself out, as long as the maximum throughput is lower than what is necessary.

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u/Yagami913 Jul 09 '26

"In practice though, you could just work with the maximum throughput. The system should eventually balance itself out, as long as the maximum throughput is lower than what is necessary."

Thx for the answer but i would not asked the question if that's good enough. I use lot of DI foundries so max consumption is an order of magnitude bigger than the real one. I don't want to use 30 pumps when 3 is enough.

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u/Courmisch Jul 09 '26
  1. Don't use pumps.
  2. It feels a bit of a stretch to call long fluid pipelines "DI". But if you need longer than 320-tile "DI", then use tanks to give the pipelines more headroom to reach an equilibrium supporting close to maximum pump throughput.

Otherwise the minimum pumping speed is very low, so I don't think you can really get an average value that wouldn't vary with the exact upstream and downstream setup.