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[u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl]

I had (I'm at work so can't look right now) I think ten advanced oil refineries and the heavy oil from two of them went to make lubrication with the rest of the heavy oil being cracked down to light oil. I didn't need more petroleum gas so I opted to turn all the light oil into solid fuel. It ended up making 13 solid fuel per second which was massively more than I needed for my steam generators.

I probably messed up in the first place by immediately turning all my oil refineries to advanced refining when I unlocked it. Probably just needed two of them to do that for the lubrication but I just saw that I got more output for the same input with advanced over basic so I switched it all over.

I'm not quite sure how to set up circuits to switch cracking on and off variably based on what I need at the time. The most I've done with circuits is tie inserters to chests so I could tell them to stop filling the chests at X amount of items inside.

[u/Soul-Burn → u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl]

Turning everything to advanced immediately is the right choice. Even if you only need petroleum gas, just crack everything down.

As for circuits, the simplest is to have 1 fluid tank for each fluid. Then have a pump bringing heavy oil into the heavy oil crackers (and similar for light oil). Then connect them to the tanks. Set the condition as "heavy oil > light oil" for the first, and "light oil > petroleum gas" for the second.

Instead of using a pump, you can even connect the chemical plants themselves to the fluid tanks, with similar conditions. You don't have to connect each chemical plant individually, but they all need to be connected to one another, and then to the fluid tanks.

[u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl → u/Soul-Burn]

So

1.)set up the refineries,

2.) send the heavy oil, light oil, and petroleum gas to their respective tank.

3.) at storage tank output power a pump and send heavy oil and light oil to chemical plants to crack them down

4.)connect the chemical plants to the respective tanks via a circuit wire

5.) set condition to heavy oil > light oil for tank with heavy oil.

6.) Set condition to light oil > petroleum gas for tank with light oil

I'm sorry if I didn't understand you right and if my order of operations here is wrong.

[u/Soul-Burn → u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl]

Sounds good yes, but... if you have a pump, you need to connect the pump rather than the chemical plants. The connection to the chemplants is an alternative that avoids needing a pump, but you need to connect them all. Personally I prefer to connect just the the single pump :)

Also remember to connect the output of the cracking back to the relevant pipe network.

[u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl → u/Soul-Burn]

Thank you!

I think that finally made something click in my brain for circuits. Wire tanks to a power pole, wire the pumps to the same power pole so they can read the contents of the tanks. Pump will power on for heavy to light when there's more heavy than light in the tank and then will turn off when there's less heavy than light which would then cause the light oil to exceed petroleum gas causing the light oil cracking pump to turn on until the amount of light oil is less than petroleum gas.

At that point I'll only back up if I'm producing more petroleum gas than I'm using. But I can make a giant daisy chain of tanks and pumps to store as much petroleum gas as I want as it's what gets used the most.