I figured out a way to power down smart inserters for the majority of the night automatically, I posted it over in the creations area. Since it is relevant to this discussion I figured I would xpost the link though.

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ?f=8&t=205

I imagine this design can be improved greatly in terms of when it powers down/up by incorporating additional elements, but I imagine that we will get a device to do this without hacking around it eventually so I didn't want to put too much time into it. Works well for powering down inserters on fact...

It may be bug, but making them negative seems to provide unlimited resources. (either that or it will crash out when it hits the edge of the variable size).