09/20/08 Generator is Down - No Electricity

I woke up this morning around 5:20AM when I usually get up. Since it was Saturday I didn’t get up immediately, but within a few minutes I noticed the power went off. We had been getting used to the power going off from time to time and within about 10 minutes Roger would normally restart the generator and we would have power again. This morning that was not the case. I layed there thinking that Roger was probably in the generator room by himself and if the power wasn’t on again then it was most likely something he could use some help with. I showed up around 5:45AM to find out that the exhaust had been turning bright red. He thought that one of the valves must have had a hole in it and the engine wasn’t working properly. Essentially one of the cylinders wasn’t firing so the remaining five were doing the work of all six. Because of this, we used quite a bit of fuel through the night and now only have two days worth of fuel left.

About ten to fifteen minutes later a few other missionaries showed up and we began taking the engine apart. I won’t go into too much detail but for those of you who know about diesel engines I’ll share a little. We had to take the head of the engine off to find the problem. Roger was right, one of the valves had a hole in it. A few of us headed down to the shop to get another valve out of a broken engine that had been sitting out exposed to the elements and was pretty rusty. We took it apart and about the time we thought we had a valve that we could use to replace the bad one, Roger came over and said that the seat of the engine was also bad so we had to replace the entire head of the engine. Our only choice was to rebuild the head of the engine that had been sitting out and rusting away so we could replace the one in the generator room. We spent the remainder of the day doing this and finally at about 9PM we had everything back together. Well, after several tries, the engine wouldn’t start. It turns out that Roger could never get the old engine to work in the first place so using it as parts wasn’t much help. Our only choice now is to order a few new parts and then rebuild the engine that we had from the start.

Fortunately, earlier in the day, we had started a smaller generator that is sitting out back and ran a few lines to the electricity grid. This little generator is only strong enough to keep our freezers going; nothing else. Well, right after we finished for the night in the generator room, I headed back to one of the missionaries homes so I could take a shower. Our water won’t run without power since it needs to pump water from our reservoire, however some missionaries’ homes are connected to the water tower and still have water pressure. After I finished I came outside to find a few guys working on keeping the smaller generator going. It turns out that the fuel supply that we got (the 1000 gallons) has some water in it so they were working on getting the water out so it would be able to run through the night. It turns out that the three guys who live in the apartments/condos had to get up in shifts throughout the night to keep it going.

I am currently sitting in our office where I am using the inverter which is connected to our satellite to write this. Hopefully, we will get the parts in a few days so we can be back in business. As for the main generator, it is quite old and we do need to buy a new one soon. The cost will be roughly $35,000 so if you would like to make a donation, please mail a check to Sonlight Ministries, P.O. Box 8031, Evansville, IN 47716. If you do, please write “generator” in the memo field. Thank you!

We are also looking into some alternative energy solutions such as wind power or solar power to reduce our dependency on diesel fuel. If you happen to have any expertise in this, please let me know.