Temp a start tempastart for your truck...need opinions

there is a company up here ran by old school trucker who uses these on his trucks (about ten trucks) in conjuction with an apu. he does this because he said he has always had this system when running up here and canada as big trucks dont like the cold. he claims his trucks have all ran better keeping the tempastart on and using it all year because no cold start ups and no low idle. so they use the apu to keep the temps warm but often here in north dakota the wind chill and temparutaure can be a total of minus 80 or colder so an apu has no chance of keeping up...and drivers often wont notice so long as the bunk heater is keeping them warm enough that their truck wont start up and when the company misses jobs it costs them dearly. so he claims this hybird type setup gets you the best of both worlds....he uses the apu for driver comfort and for helping keep the engine warmer but then the tempastart is the fail safe if the apu cant keep up the temp, the truck will start the engine on its own and run to maintain temp and warm oil and block. i just was wondering what all my trucking brethern thought of these tempa starts and what they think of the combo of the two considering the extreme climate we run in. I already have the thermo king tri pac apu (just got to get it running, another thread) so id be looking at the tempastart which looks to be about 2600 installed. does anyone have one or any experience with them they can share with all of us here. i would sure appreaciate it. thanks guys.

 

I've heard though that these water heater units take a lot of battery juice so what happens when the battery gets so depleted and the arctic temps make it even more hard on your batteries nw lowered by your water coolant heater. This has been my only objection this far to using this type of setup instead of tempa start apu

 

Does anyone actually have and use a tempa start type system.

 

Good call with the wind chill article. I was having trouble wrapping my head around it. Because of the idea of a radiator moves air past it to drop temp so that made me think wind chill had to effect it. But the light came on when I realized that the fact is that no amount of wind can reduce an inanimate objects temp to below that of the ambient temperature. The wind does however play a role in how fast a truck or it's components will reach the ambient temperature. So for my tempa start, the unit would fire up the truck more frequently due to the more rapid loss of operating temps from the wind blowing underneath the truck.

I saw saw someone mention the belly tarp for cold weather operation. This sounded interesting.

Also, still looking for anyone who has a tempa start type system. I understand that several truck manufacturers have their own similar system that starts the truck based in coolant temp or cab temp.
Anyone out there have these and what's your experience with them?

 

Yes I'm very interested in the maxwells. But the reason for me wanting the tempa start is that I had heard even an apu wouldn't help you at -10 or below. Where I work it gets -50 or so at times. And it happens out of nowhere. So if I were out of town for a week and came back during one of these cold snaps, I wouldn't be able to start my rig. N

In my business, the contract is the most important thing. It gives you the work. And they are hard to come by for hauling crude. You usually have to work someplace as a company driver for a year or more to show them how good you are, before they will let you put a truck on. And they'd only do that to keep from losing you all together. But so far this winter I've seen three guys out if the 17 get there contracts cancelled because they couldn't get there equipment going and keep it going in the cold. And there are lots of others just waiting to take your place. So they have no real tolerance for equipment problems and expect you to have a separate rig just standing by in case your main rig goes down. For me, financially right now I can only afford to have the one rig. So it's worth the cost of the 1300 tempa start to always know that my rig is ready to roll.

Hell id spend that plus more just on thawing out my rig to a mechanic here one time. Not to mention the peace of mind of knowing it's always ready to roll. So it's not a save the 1300 dollars type argument for me. It's be triple redundant that your equipment is ready to roll no matter what the weather is.

I know cummins had a system that does this, so did Volvo, and others. So I'm just wondering how everybody who uses them likes them.

I can can see where over the road this type of system would not make much sense. But for me I work where it is winter time 7 months out of the year.

Also so this system monitors batteries and recharges those when they get low, so the already 1000 I've spent on batteries this winter would have been saved as well.