09/29/08

I woke up this morning around 3:30AM and noticed that the power was off. I layed there for a few minutes contemplating if I should get up and go to the generator room to see if anyone was working. At that hour I didn’t think that anyone would be so I decided to sleep until about 5:30 and then make my way over. By the time I got up and got out of the house, I walked into the generator room around 6:00AM and didn’t find anyone inside. I could tell that someone had been in there and was working on it, but they had already left so I headed back to the Alexander’s and found a few of them eating breakfast.

I sat down with them and after talking I had found out that the generator quit running around midnight and a few of them had been out there until 4:00AM until they all went back to bed. I couldn’t believe that it had broken down that quickly. It turns out that the engine is working fine, but now it is the actual generator that is bad. The generator mainly has two parts to it: an engine and the generator that the engine turns to produce electricity. Within the generator there are copper wires strung around and around inside which spin past magnets to make the electricity. Somehow, one of the copper wires burn out which was just enough to shut us down.

In order to fix this we had to pull the entire engine and generator (around 1200lbs) out of the generator room so we could work on it. Normally, we have room inside to take things apart, but the generator itself weights too much for four people to carry. We had to connect it to a tractor and drag it out into the school yard where we could work on it. Here is a picture of the generator looking from inside the generator room out the wall that it was pulled through.



At about this point, Roger wanted me to go back to the office to work on some accounting so I didn’t help for the rest of the project. I came out a little later and found that some scaffolding was built in order to hoist the generator into the air. At this point in the day we were a little stuck as we didn’t have all the supplies to fix the generator.