Single planet pi

I am reevaluating single planet PI. 

For the record, I don't like single planet PI.  It is wasteful of CPU and powergrid; either by running 2 extractor control units, or by running additional storage and swapping ECU between them.  It has also historically been a profit destroyer, that is it used to consume more ISK than it created. That is, previously you could sell the mats for more than the final product.
 http://foo-eve.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/single-planet-pi-manufacturing-bad.html presents some alternatives.

All of the above said, what single planet PI is good for is no fuss manufacture of P2 or P3 items.  Also, at the moment at least, conventional knowledge that single planet PI destroys value may be wrong.

I have created a page on my PI spreadsheet for single planet PI.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lXM8PqU0Tn4EJJ2xRuI7uo55IrZ7MKWJidK9T_bA9L4/edit#gid=964439998

My spreadsheets are provided as is, where is.  Please note that this page is still considered 'draft' and may have errors.  But it has planet types, and what can be extracted and manufactured on a single planet.  As with most of my spreadsheets, it is based around 4% PI tax (being what a Foo corp charges by default).

Column A lists planet types and what can be made on your typical planet without importing. Column C lists the average sell prices across 4 trade hubs.  Columns D and E refer to the value made or destroyed by turning your items into the relevant P2 instead of selling parts.

For example a Barren planet Biocells manufacture on that screenshot (late January 2015) show that not only are the best 'average sell', but also have the best earnings over the component parts, stating that despite my reservations, maybe some forms of single planet PI may be profitable.    What is most profitable to make in the future will change.

Polytextiles are still truly aweful.  If you need polytextiles for other items, consider importing them and let someone else destroy their own ISK.

2 Extractor control heads still are very expensive (Power and CPU) to run.  I still don't like it, but can see value some pilots who are paying high import/output taxes, or who simply don't want to be in system or fiddle with their PI much.

Changing PI prices

I am a moderately happy PI farmer.

I have been sitting on stacks of PI scattered around highsec stations as various wormholes allow.  This is generally not something I would consider smart, but events have favoured me.

The following graphs PI prices over the last 3 months, taken from http://eve-marketdata.com

Autotrophs

Industrial Fibers

Polyaramids

Broadcast Node

High-tech Transimtters

Many PI products are showing a roughly 20% price increase since mid to late December.

I can think of 2 contributing factors to the upward pricing that occurred at this time: the jump (freighter) nerf limiting goods from nullsec; and the change to how google docs based price importing works breaking many spreadsheets.

I am somewhat pleasantly surprised as I expected  the lower costs in highsec with player owned customs offices enabling lower PI costs in highsec to counter this, but the graphs above (derived from prices in game) reflect reality rather than expectations.

Techical update on Google docs & Eve Central

Google docs and the Eve central API for data has not been playing nicely.

I wrote up my implementation of a solution based on Steve Ronuken's google script fix, that works moderately well.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lXM8PqU0Tn4EJJ2xRuI7uo55IrZ7MKWJidK9T_bA9L4/edit#gid=0

http://foo-eve.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/pi-spreadsheet-working-again.html

The problem I had is that Google was caching data for far too long, and I missed some price changing trends.

The solution is to use a ?cachebuster=<value> parameter when you want a new call.

From the Eve Central API, apparently we are allowed to pull the same data every 5 minutes.  ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/eve-central/b5FjssiqFIQ ).

For my purposes, I don't care about completely current pricing, and price refreshing makes my spreadsheet unusable for about 30 seconds while it happens.  My current solution is to pass the day of the month as the cachebuster parameter, that is I request different data once per 24 hours.

I will be keeping a bit more of a closer eye on this as PI prices have moved around a bit over the last few weeks (post scheduled for Tuesday my time).