MPG and Idling....

Tell them you'd like to drop your truck off at the nearest terminal when your off of your load. Clean out your truck and turn in your keys.

I'm local running a day cab. I idle at the plant and if I'm waiting at a farm. No one ever says anything. Hauling milk burns fuel, lots of fuel. 2017 t880 paccar mx13 18 speed 3.55 gears. I'm lucky if I get 4.5 mpg. It's just the nature of the beast. Heavy fluid loads combined with hills. No one says anything about fuel economy

 

Why invest $ in a apu on a truck they will only keep three years. Just idle it. Getting over 7 and still idling 10 to12 hours a day still isn’t worth the investment.

 

I will NOT name the carrier, but this carrier is noted for being "Richard Crainium's" on this issue. One of their drivers who actually did not want to quit spent some money and hired an attorney to write this carrier a cease and desist warning letter! The letter was based in part on THIS OSHA agreement with the FMCSA.

This person could not sleep in the heat and it was affecting his alertness that next day, directly making his inability to sleep a SAFETY issue! Because the driver was on record with a possible complaint the carrier's legal department got involved and the carrier then relented and allowed him to idle OR they bought a hotel room! That letter removed that carrier's ability to have plausible deniability if something later happened!

AS a driver YOU MUST NOT allow the carrier to DO ANYTHING that causes a situation where YOU as a driver are not operating safely! If you like your job in an extreme case consulting a knowledgable Attorney may make some sense! If you generally are not happy, then leave!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

my 97 w9 was 5.8 last quarter running the north east, I’ll be interested to see if it gets better after doing the overhead, manifold and some other work in a few weeks.

apu still need to run to drive the compressor for ac so the unit has to run, 12k to burn half a gallon of fuel an hour instead of 3/4 of a gallon to idle has never made sense to me, but I’m not a bean counter.... never mind the ridiculous Cost of fixing them when they break. I can burn a lot of fuel, which is still a write off, before breaking even on an apu. I do have a bunk heater for the winter though which is probably one of my favorite things I’ve ever done on any vehicle

 

I had a computer crash a while back and because of sloppy storage, I lost a lot of things. One thing I lost was a good chart that did a year by year breakdown of the costs to run the main engine and the cost of an APU. It might sound strange, but an APU can almost pay for itself in a few years. This is not APU maker propaganda either! I am not 100% sure anymore, but there were also some tax breaks applied for installing APUs. There is more on this topic then just fuel!

 

I used to work at Schneider on tank division, one DBL and I could not see eye to eye on anything, if I told him it was 100 degrees where I was and I was not turning the truck off, he’d tell me it was 70 and cloudy according to the weather there.
I went to that terminal Reserve, La and talked to the lady in charge of them in person, told her I wanted a new DBL or either I would quit.
I got a new one right there, he was more laid back and didn’t care, as long as you didn’t have any accident/incident, he had the highest safety rating of all the drivers on his list than any other DBL there.

since I no longer work there, and all the people I knew have left, here’s a trick that worked on tanker side.
If you have a PTO switch, turn it on.
My truck would count idle time backwards for 5 minutes.
Then the truck would beep.
Turn pto off, idle until it says idle shutdown, turn pto back on. Repeat.

I kept a 15% idle time and got a fuel bonus for all the quarters I worked there, and idled all but about a month when it was nice outside.

 

Estes Express is hiring in North Carolina:

 

R&L Carriers in North Carolina:

 

ABF in North Carolina:

 

Old Dominion Freight Line in North Carolina: