Taking the plunge. My journey as an O/O.

I run 34's because it is far more efficient, and I like to drive.

If you run recaps, when your truck goes into the shop, you probably lose a driving day. Unless something that sidelines the truck comes up, or it takes two or more days to fix, I don't. If the truck needs a small job done, I check into a shop, arrange for service, then shut down and start a 34. When the 34 is done, my truck is ready.

By using my hometime and 34's for service time, despite all the service I have had done on the truck, I have lost a grand total of 4 days of driving time due to truck maintenance in six months.

Also, I can run out a 34 in 5 to 6 days, which sometimes allows me to have more than 70 hours of on-duty/driving time in a 7 day week. I rarely push THAT hard anymore. That's a bit much even for me, and trying to make that happen is far more stress than it's worth.

I do not count myself as on duty when I'm chilling in the sleeper on the very rare occasion that I live load or unload.

 

The inverter turned into a complicated mess.

The new inverter parts cost about $250 for a 1000w/2000w (steady/peak) pure sine wave inverter.

The removal of the clusterfork double-inverter install Crete did, and new install of the inverter I bought cost about $175. (Done by a shop)

Then I noticed my battery backup for the CPAP beeping. It was indicating a line fault.

Plug bug, short extension cord, parts to run a new ground, and a temporary 400w inverter all total cost me about $200. (I did that work, running the new ground.)

That didn't fix the issue. I limped on until Home Time, hoping my CPAP would not fry. It didn't.

Had batteries checked. Had chassis grounds removed, cleaned, reinstalled. Had the inverter rewired to put a disconnect switch between batteries and inverter, so the inverter lines could be depowered (they could not before, and that was retarded and unsafe.)

I also bought a very nice surge suppressing, Voltage Regulating, 1500w uninterruptible power supply to feed the CPAP and laptops.

All told, the electrical crap related to the inverter failure ended up costing me around 2000. Yes. That's a whole lot more than it should have cost. For that price though, I now I have more inverter capacity for electronics, a cleaner install, a safe way to service or replace the inverter in the future, and peace of mind that the truck probably won't burn down because I screwed something up.

I also know that ground testers for household current are worthless for testing chassis grounds on vehicles that are not grounded to earth.

 

They had two inverters powered off the battery in parallel.

One was a 1000w square wave inverter. The other was a 300w pure sine wave inverter. The 1000w unit was not powering anything. The 300w unit was powering the UPS, which, in turn, was powering my CPAP, phone charger, and whichever laptop I was using.

One of my laptops is a gaming laptop that pulls a lot more than 300w. I gamed on it for several hours on the day the 300w inverter smoked itself.