Produce / Ice Cream - Continuous Run

Reason they want cont. is it less chance that your unit wont restart. If there is a bigger swing in you temp you might have bad seals or need to have your unit checked out. I have only used cont a couple times and havent seen any difference in temp swing

 

Unless the programming has been changed, most units run +/- 2* on continuous, and won't even start until +/- 4* on start/stop.

 

I have friends. I have been told of trailers with misting systems, for produce that can keep the product farm fresh days longer. I have not seen one. If bus stops in hot climates have misting agents, why can't a reefer. I hauled flat bed most of the time. Spent most of my time keeping everything dry.

 

part of the reason for continuous is the extra time it takes to start cooling or heating as most reefers wont go to high speed until engine has run a few minutes allowing temps to get further out of range i normally drop or raise temp a degree or two on cycle depending on outside temp

 

No way!









JK

 

Exactly what Hammer said on the previous page.

Late this last spring and early summer I was hearing of a TON of strawberry loads being rejected.. one of my drivers had the chance to take a load of Driscolls from Los Angeles to Tennessee... I was pretty nervous after hearing about all the rejected loads that were coming out of Cali (NONE of them were my drivers BTW) and I asked the guy what the story was on those, and his opinion was that a lot of guys would try to "cheat the reefer unit" and not run it continuously. SOOOO that taught me, that if they say continuous.. by all means run it continuous!

 

The customer gets whatever they ask for when I load. It's in writing on the rate con, so I do it. If I know it's wrong or at least looks that way, I ask, verify, and get it in writing. The couple of bucks of fuel and run time some requests may consume are not worth second-guessing or trying to get cheap with.

The most common issues I hear about with product temp rejection are more with operators that don't know jack about their equipment operation beyond the on/off switch and temp settings, and never take a look up at the ceiling when sweeping out the trailer. Those are the ones that will hit a dock and load a truckload of produce with the chute halfway pulled down, or drive an 8 hour stretch while the unit is sitting back there dead with an alternator fault light burning or out of fuel.

 

I had a newb driver that agreed to take a frozen load out of Southern Florida and I told him three times, if not more, that his trailer needed to be precooled to -10 or they wouldn't load him. I get a call from the shipper wondering where the hell my driver was, he had been to the loading facility and disappeared after supposedly needing some freon in his unit because it wasn't down to temp. Anyway.. turns out he didn't need freon.. he had a HOLE in the roof of his trailer that made it physically impossible to get his trailer down to temp period, much less be able to haul a frozen load halfway across the country. This was a great guy, super courteous and very prompt etc.. but so much a newbie on the road that it never occured to him to check all temps when buying his reefer. To have it calibrated and double check those temp readings.. aye aye aye... Needless to say he didn't pull that load, and is very lucky that none of his previous loads had been rejected. They all have to learn somehow, somewhere.. but risking a customer's load to possible spoilage/melt down, not cool!!

 

There is a setting on Carrier units that I ran for years, and would allow for an A, B, or C temperature spread. The big thing to remember when running reefer is the temperature you are seeing on the screen, is the air discharge temperature, otherwise the air as it's leaving the evaporator unit. I've been running multi-temp units and that is another thing that requires some thought in the loading. For example, you will normally want the main to handle the heaviest of the heating or cooling. The loads I'm hauling are most times 3/5 frozen, and 2/5 fresh. We run the frozen off the main and center divide and bulkhead the secondary evaporator, as the cooling or heating capacity is much less. The biggest problem is more so keeping the fresh away from the center divide as the cold transfer is pretty strong, and insuring the panels and bulkhead are in good shape and installed properly. Another way of helping the load is to use thermal blankets to help protect from the extreme cold (temps at -10F and 35F). That being said, it would be helpful if the DC didn't keep destroying the panels (although they are charged back at $600 a pop, so destroy away). Another concern for maintaining frozen is outside air temp and the sun. Does improve somewhat when rolling, but the sun beating down on a stopped trailer can make any reefer work much harder.

Other tips that I've seen mentioned are running the cooler side a bit warmer. That must be watched closely as some shippers are using product placed temp recording devices, and most modern reefers now have a dataport for downloading the temperature log as the reefer sees it. With the advent of HACCP and tighter FDA and CFSA controls, product out of temperature range will be rejected, and at the carriers cost as a claim. The driver will be held responsible for this if he has altered the parameters of the reefer operating cycles. This is why a reefer load does pay more than dry freight as the risk is much higher, and in many cases, the load can easily be worth $250,000 or more.

 

I disagree with this. I have to scroll through the menu to find the air discharge temp.