When you place a steam request chest, it became from a different faction, then you can't mine or do anything with it.

a nvm, so it became a different faction if it runs out of steam..... why would it do that? Needing steam to remove or manual open it is quite annoying.

It's a limitation of the game and it is pretty annoying. There's no way to disable a logistics chest. I work around it by assigning it to a different force when it's out of power, but then it's impossible to mine them. Another way to deal with this would be to swap them out with a normal chest when they run out of steam. But that comes with it's own set of challenges like restoring circuits and requests.

Please +1 this bug from the forum to help me out, although I doubt they'll fix them before 2.0 comes out.

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=111359

Yah, I had imagined was something to do with the game limitations. They probably won't do anything on this version anymore :(

I'm trying to use these on an SE game right now and it's a little frustrating to deal with. I might find a better way to implement it eventually, or just rush normal requester chests

This is fixed in the latest release. It was made possible by new API features in factorio 2.0

WoW!