Battle of the APUs

My truck had an idle free electric apu when I bought it , when it was connected to the reefer link it worked well and heated the engine ....unconnected to the reefer link it was worthless and the built inverter was very lame .
One night it shorted out and got so hot it melted the batteries and it went to the scrap pile.
Replaced it with a diesel carrier that has 15k hours on it now and it has given me very few problems...its a little loud tho.
I run full synthetic 5w40 oil in it that is always drained before 1000 hours and all the filters get changed.
At 2000 hours the generater belt gets changed...it gets iffy after that.
Spring and fall I wash out the housing and engine .
It has been thru 1 control panel and 1 mother board neither of which is cheap along with an alternater and a starter.
I bought it used with 7605 hrs on it for 2500.00...they are plentiful and cheap, I like that it can be programmed to run continuous or start stop and it will monitor several conditions at once as well as heat the truck engine.
Non of the apus I've had have been cheap to maintain but I wouldn't be without one .

 

Not to mention the savings on maintenance and downtime on emissions system from not idling main engine.

 

Yeah, plus if you open the box and see a motor, it's diesel, but if there's just a bunch of batteries instead, then it's electric.

 

Thermo king engineers assume every day a trucker wakes up and drives 600 miles on the highway without stopping thus recharging the tripac batteries.If not well have fun in that florida heat tonight son cause your a/c ain't gonna work.

 

Thermoking has excuse. They are from Minnesota how do they know Florida temperatures.

 

My factory installed EPU does a decent job keeping the sleeper cool, not cold. IMO it does good enough and no noise and exhaust is a plus, I have RV batteries installed so not having a problem with low voltage. Would I go with an EPU again yes.

 

We have a mix of TK tripaks/Evolutions and Carrier APU's in our lease fleet.

As you can guess, the guys that maintain their equipment still have working units. While the rest are constantly chasing gremlins.

We just bought a few new Freightliners with their EPU package. Had them configured to auto start the truck if the EPU battery bank needs charging. Should be a good test for them this summer.

 

I have also noticed those that neglect these units and wait for them to quit running are the ones with a higher instance of problems.
When I was a company driver I worked for a fleet that bought new tri paks on theyre new trucks and they did zero maintenance on them until they would no longer run .

 

Proactive maintenance beats reactive maintenance every time. Also cheaper in the long run. But bean counters are to ####ing stupid to realize that. College educated idiots

 

Lol actually no it's a fleet in south omaha I'm sure you are aware of and it isn't Morehouse.