Abilene Motor Express....A New Place To Call Home

Boy, my truck is VERY unhappy.

My check engine light is on. No big deal, it's been on for six months or more. I don't even pay attention to it anymore. Whenever I take hometime, I put in a ticket with the shop. Whenever I get back from hometime, the check engine light is off! And whenever I get back out on the road, the check engine light comes on within 10 minutes. So clearly the shop is looking at it and deciding they don't wanna do anything other than clear the alarms. If that's good enough for them, it's good enough for me.

Starting a couple days ago, though, I started getting additional "Check Engine Fault" warnings on the LED readout. Normally it just says that when I start it up, but a couple days ago it started throwing them at me every 5-10 minutes. Well that's kind of unusual, so I put in at the TA in Knoxville during my downtime and had them look at it. They said it was something to do with the exhaust system regulation.

But they didn't actually fix it, see? Because I'm still getting the errors and now I'm getting a lot more. I'm getting "Critically low coolant level" warnings even though I have checked the reservoir and verified that there's plenty of coolant in there. I'm getting "ACM Fault" warnings. I'm getting "SCR System Fault. Engine Derate in > 60 minutes" warnings.

It's darned annoying.

Because of all of this, I'm sleeping with the engine off tonight despite the low temps because my plan is to wake up here in 6 hours, roll the half-a-mile to the receiver, deliver their lunchmeat or whatever, and then call breakdown to have this thing taken care of for real. And I don't want the truck derating while I sleep.

And since I want to sleep tonight, I figured I'd flip the reefer from start/stop to continuous so that it wouldn't wake me up in the middle of the night turning itself off and on 18 inches from my head.

Except that someone else already did it.

I know for a fact it was start/stop when I picked it up, and it's continuous mode now, and I am not the one who switched it. So I'm guessing that the guy next to me decided he didn't want to be woken up by a reefer turning off and on all night either.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this.

 

Maybe someone in the office did it, they can change them remotely.

 

Looks like it's moving day. Got my Volvo up on cinder blocks in the front yard of this repair shop. Repairs will take at least two days, so rather than put me up in a hotel for two days and pay me two days worth of breakdown pay, they're sending someone to fetch me and take me to another truck. A 2017 KW, so my Volvo experience has come to an end for the moment. Will be fun getting used to a completely different clutch and transmission when it comes time to go backwards, but that's why they pay me the medium-sized bucks.

 

But always a good reminder for all of us.

 

My wife is coming out for a couples weeks at some point... thinking we will be getting one before then as well...

If we don’t, I never will get to where I’m going while stopping the Truck every 2 hours... lol

 

Personally, instead of swapping trucks, I’d take a couple days off and Uber to do stuff in the area... enjoy a couple days off while they fix your Ride... but that’s just me...

 

Just what the heck are they throwing away???

 

They cleaned out their ports potty from the truck then properly placards the container

 

I tried. They were curiously resistant to paying me two days worth of breakdown pay while I lounged about in a hotel room.

 

That is curious. They left a friend of mine in his truck in the desert for 5 days (where they never even called once to see if he was ok & I told him he was nuts not to go to a motel even though the nearest one was 25 miles away & transportation was iffy), in a motel in WV for 4 days, in a motel in OH for 8 days and i think there was 1 more place as well. All in the span of 4 months time.