AlpineRAM

Hi Mexstan!

I would like to help, but a flight to you might be a little cost prohibitive...

But you can help me with some stuff that you will need in any kind of decent planning.

First: Peak power consumption-

Make a spreadsheet (or a table) with all the electrical devices you will need to supply, and make a note of their power consumption (Be it in Volts and Amps or in Watts)
EG:

Fridge kitchen1 200W

Fridge kitchen 2 110V 3A

Coffee maker Mexstan 15 bazillion Watts


If you want to make it easy you use columns with Watts Amps and Volts- so you just enter what you know and the spreadsheet will do the rest.
This will give us "dumb peak power" if we multiply it by 6 for the average household appliance.
Please do not forget light bulbs etc..

This would be your peak power consumption if everything was switched on at once- or after a power outage with all the lights switched on and all the freezers warm, water heaters cold etc. (Thats's whyI call it "dumb" - you should not do that and you will not do that, but let's make sure that even if someone dumb does it you won't see all the infrastructure go up in smoke.
(This phenomenon is why blackouts and brownouts last so long- all the dumb fridges and water heaters etc know that they have to start the moment electricity comes back. Every compressor, light bulb etc wants to start at once and will take a lot more than rated power to get going, and also will consume ratet power until a target temperature is met or it is turned off. In a normal usage your fridge will consume rated power less than 1 hour a day and our "dumb" peak power for less than five seconds a day. )

Now select into 3 categories-

Priority immediate -Things that need full starting power right now, no matter what! Lighting, fire alarms, fire suppression, medical gear etc.

Priority 5-10 minutes -- Everything that has a small UPS inside- like telephony main switchboards, IT central etc

Low priority mass consumers: Fridges, Water heaters, Cellphone chargers, kitchen implements etc. (Stuff you need but where you can accept if it has no power for at least 15-20 minutes)
Sorted after those categories you will have, if you take 6 times the rated power for the first category and twice the power for the second category and once for the third category what I call the provisioning factor.
This is what will be needed for a power supply as a max output.

You will need to install a load management, and for example medical gear should have all the power it wants whenever it is needed, and a fridge or a water heater will need to wait until all the stuff from the higher categories has started, and this group will be started in a staggered fashion, meaning that the last fridge will receive power after a long time, because all the other more important things have their power needs fulfiled.

This calculation will also show you how big a storage you will need if for example photovoltaics is the sole power source-

Medical gear- needs rated power for as long as the maximum dark period.

Fridge- needs it's daily average within 5 portions of a 24 hour period. (With a little help of a bag of frozen water or saline depending on the device)

What I do find in a lot of places is that this study does not take place and a genset is bought with the sum of all rated power as found with about 25% room to grow.
This will definitely not work in a stable fashion. If all the devices are turned on and want to start at the same time after a power outage- the genset will not be able to deliver starting current and a lot of damage occurs.
With a little bit of planning and a "turn on schedule" this same genset will work, but will only be sutable for emergency power, simply because it is much too big to work economically all day round (see my last post in this thread)

For a sustainable 24/7 schedule off the grid you will need to supply an energy input of the same average you have now ( this can be calculated into square meters of PV or wind turbines, gensets etc for your location), an energy storage being able to supply the needed amount of energy for the "maximum dark time" in PV or maximum "no wind time" in wind turbines- simply when you do not get energy from your sources.
And you will need a "peak wattage" from your storage and your inverter that deliver to your "provisioning factor"

Now for gensets turbines etc-
All that stuff has an abysmal efficiency on the electrical side-
But if you have need of the heat things get very different!-
In case of a genset running low loads you will be able to harvest heat from the coolant and maybe from the exhaust gas temperature, but will not be able to catch the energy from pumping losses.
A decent load management (simple one would be to stagger the turning on of fridges and electrical heaters) will enable you to reduce the size of the genset significantly and still provide the needed power with some "luxury" power to spare.
This will save fuel and increase the rate of recoverable heat that you can use.
This is very interesting if you can produce your own bio gas or something the like, because if you can store the gas until the night when you need light and heating this can be very efficiant and a good addition to PV


HTH

Markus

xxwildbillxx

Unfortunately ran across this wayyy too late... How did your off-grid plans for the "orphanage" pan out? If by chance you're still looking for ideas... one way to compensate for fuel costs when running a diesel generator, is to mix the diesel fuel 50/50 with filtered waste vegetable oil. If, however, the climate/seasons in your area are too cold, you could easily mix filtered waste veg oil with a small percentage of regular unleaded gasoline to thin down the thickness/viscosity of the veg oil... of course obtaining a free, bartered or low cost source of waste vegetable oil is the tricky part but if you over come this hurdle the rest is pretty easy. Incidentally, I've been running my 03 Ram on waste veg (off and on) for almost 10yrs now and have been utilizing some of the same tricks I just mentioned

Mexstan

Late or not, all info is welcome. The latest is that the orphanage managed to purchase a whole bunch of solar panels at a huge discount. The problem was bringing them down from the states. They now have most of them on site and are working on getting them up. This week the concrete was poured for the supports. Two weeks ago a work team came down from Canada and painted all the steel beams that will be used for the panels. Now they are waiting for another work team to come down and start the erection. By the time everything is up and running, the entire orphanage should be off grid during the day.

Maybe we can look at your idea for some night power to stay off the grid.

Thanks for answering.

xxwildbillxx

Sounds like things are going well...

Good luck with the continued success of the orphanage!

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas & Have a Happy New Years!