Making fluid management easy!
How it's done
All it takes to get started is 3 simple steps.
- Build the actual blueprint (duh)
- connect water and crude oil to input and output to storage tanks
- connect the decider combinators
And you are done!
The blueprint uses some speed modules I, but it's not mandatory assuming you won't use 100% of the materials produced. Just a personal preference of mine to get the numbers as perfect as possible.
Blueprint orientation
Since the blueprint is tiled it's entirely possible to connect the inputs/outputs from both sides. Also rotating and mirroring it shouldn't affect anything.
Connecting input to output
There are 3 inputs in total that need to be connected. 2 inputs below the oil refinery for water and oil and one above for water.
This only needs to be done once.
The logistic network
To get started you have to connect the input of one of the decider combinators to all the storage tanks that you use. In my case I always use 4 for each fluid so I can have a crisp 100k as maximum capacity.
Why it's there
The decider combinators are there to ensure that the system always produces all the necessary liquids. In this case the network will make sure that there's always at least 50k of each fluid in the network, or half of max capacity.
For example, the network will prioritise making lube before it starts making more light oil in case the demand is higher than the production rate.
Changing it to your needs
You can of course change the numbers in the decider combinators to suit whatever you are producing, but that might become tedious if you ever want to change them.
What I would recommend, however, is to set up a constant combinator at the start of the network, connect it to the input of one of the deciders and make it output the exact amount that you want to always have for each liquid multiplied by -1, and in all the deciders put the value for each liquid to 0. This means that changing the value in the constant combinator would make it reflect on the entire production line.
Why should I care?
Although If you don't care about any of that you can just remove the decider combinators and let it do it's thing.
Last but not least
If you use the blueprint more than once just connect the closest decider combinators between the tiles. You will need to use the electric pole between them for that though.