Denisac

Use a world anchor at both your quarry and home base so that the chunks do not unload and continue to work while you are not playing. I am going off the assumption that the home base does not have an anchor (and thus unloads). I've done this myself a couple of times myself and felt a little foolish later.

Personally am a fan of the automated crafting table approach combined with IC2 machines. 64 coal, 8 flint and an obsidian later you get a diamond using a couple of compressors, a couple of automated crafting tables and a macerator. Highly recommend heavily overclocking the macerator if you do this though, waiting on all that coal dust is a bit of a pain. Too bad EE makes the diamond just outta the stack of coal in a condensor.

Another alternative is to loop the pipe back to the chest you are pulling from or back onto itself. That way any ore that can't get into the macerator (or electric furnace for that matter) will end up back in the que instead of on the floor.