It sounds like you don't have either sufficient power generation to meet your fluctuating power demands while also charging your accumulators or enough accumulators to supply enough power overnight. Accumulators will only charge if you've got excess power available in your power distribution network. Think of accumulators as giant batteries that store excess power and release that power when you don't have enough generation capacity.
So if your factory demands 90 MW/s of power to run, and you're producing 120 MW/s of power from your steam engines and solar panels. Lets say it's 80 MW/s from steam and 40 MW/s from solar. The excess of 30 MW/s will be channelled into and charge your accumulators. However at night, when your solar panels stop generating power, then your accumulators will supply 10MW/s of power to keep your factory running.
However each accumulator can provide 300 kW/s and stores 5MJ of energy per accumulator. (1 Joule = 1 Watt per second). According to the linked Wiki page, it takes roughly 17 seconds for a single accumulator to charge/discharge at the max rate of 300 kW/s. I have no idea how long night lasts, but it's significantly longer than 17 seconds. Given the above scenario, you're going to need at least 34 accumulators to provide 10MW/s of power collectively, and they will be able to do that for 17 seconds.
It sounds like you need more accumulators than you currently have so that they last through the night. I like to set up a builder to automatically create accumulators and just forget about it until I need to build more.
I like to build accumulator blocks in the following fashion:
A A A A A A A
A A A A A A A
A A A A A A A
A A A S A A A
A A A A A A A
A A A A A A A
A A A A A A A
A: Accumulator
S: Substation
Where A is an Accumulator and S is a Substation. I've got many many many of these ones built for my factory along with the popular solar panel plant design where you use substations, solar panels, accumulators and robo-ports together to build large tracts of solar panels separated by accumulators.
It's worth noting that if you're doing a large scale operation involving lots of robots (for example using them to lay concrete, or the large scale building of solar plants) the robo-ports will draw a very large amount of power while they are building. I had this happen multiple times where my robots drain my accumulators overnight while clearing large tracts of land. The solution was to place more solar panels and accumulators to store more energy. I'm up to about 3.2 GJ of accumulators I think.
Happy building.
Since version 0.15.8 the game displays these probabilities to enough precision (using percentage notation) to see usable values for the uranium processing recipe, but if you're still interested, the exact definition can be found in the game's files. data/base/prototypes/recipe/recipe.lua
contains:
{
name = "uranium-235",
probability = 0.007,
amount = 1
},
{
name = "uranium-238",
probability = 0.993,
amount = 1
}
For each batch of ore you process, the result is independently selected according to those probabilities. On average you will get 7 235U and 993 238U out of every 1000, but there is no guarantee of exact numbers.
Since this is much, much larger than the ratio needed for fuel production (1:19), you must do something about the extra 238U.
First, create a generous storage buffer (I recall needing about four steel chests) to keep 238U from clogging things up until you have a better solution.
Research the technology Kovarex enrichment process. This will allow you to convert 238U into 235U, which will not only solve your ratio problem but also allow for immensely more efficient use of uranium ore (and fewer centrifuges).
Note that the actual enrichment process requires that you have at minimum 40 235U as a catalyst which you keep circulating, and preferably more to get the cycle going better despite items sitting idle in belts and input slots. (Players have come up with a wide variety of designs for this.) Therefore, it is wise to save up some 235U early on and not turn it all into fuel, so you don't have to wait again to bootstrap your enrichment.
(Optional:) Research the technology Uranium ammo. This allows you to use extra 238U for another purpose. (The technology Atomic bomb uses 235U so it is not helpful here.)
Best Answer
Water and steam bottlenecks will not become apparent until you actually start using the water and steam. So I don't think you will be able to find out the practical limit without drawing the power.
That said, you do not have to actually use all that power to test the output:
If you have large banks of accumulators, recharging them provides plenty of load on your grid.
A single accumulator can draw only 300kW, however, so it will take 134 of them to accommodate a single 40MW reactor (no adjacency bonuses) - not practical if you do not already have large banks of accumulators.
If you do have enough, simply disconnecting power until they are discharged and then reconnecting it should show you the actual power output of your plant.
Alternatively, placing a bank of fluid tanks behind your steam turbines will allow them to absorb all the excess steam production which can actually reach them.
Grab a timer, connect the fluid tanks, wait for a time period you're comfortable with, then disconnect them. Each unit of steam has 0.097MJs of energy, so
amount_of_steam * 0.097 / time_in_seconds
will be equal to the excess output of your plant.Since this is the excess output, add it to your actual consumption during the period to get the full output.
(Output capped at the theoretical turbine output,
5.82MW * turbines
).