The Old Man's career dries up, Snackbar transfers to Crete from Shaffer

I think my first truck at my last company and first one at crete had one of those. It was ok, but yeah, in hot temps wouldn't last a full night, woke up drenched a few times. Mechanics hated them too, pita to repair. Had a regular app in my second truck, was loud. Only had a few months like October to December so didnt use much.

 

I gotta wonder if they cherry pick their "test" drivers. Tablets, cruise, etc. I know they tried testing the apus on the Walmart fleet at Paul's valley, so how that equals what itd be like otr idk

 

interestingly my thermoking APU has been nothing but problems, and it’s been the same issues on different trucks and apus. Really weird and frustrating. currently it doesn’t work at all lol, won’t start, the controller completely dead. I been in the dealer for these things almost every quarter since I started at my company.

 

Interesting device. Never seen a touch tone pay fone. Old ones around here were all rotary with coin slots until they were removed, if I remember correctly. I do remember when touch tone “technology” arrived, and wondered what they would think of next. Jeeeez!

 

Building a storage/ drivers area building at Wilmer

 

There was a whole year or two of TK controllers that shorted out when you touched it with static electricity. All you do is remove the wall controller via the mounting tabs, unplug the controller for 5-10 seconds, plug it in and remount. Highly annoying but easy to fix. I got into the habit of touching the metal bed rail before the controller. The new units are updated.

 

Even dynamic who used them for years went away from them on their new trucks.

 

Even with all the same, the overall cost savings isn't there.

I loved my thermoking APU for the 4ish years I had it, except for about about 3 months. It started with the fuel pump "going bad" and progressed to a full on parts cannon job that easily cost more than replacing the entire APU would have - at least according to the service advisor. At lot of the other apu trucks had similar problems. One part "goes bad" and gets replaced, but the part wasn't really bad it was a symptom of a deeper problem usually found inside the ecm module which costs $2,500.

At the end of the day the projected savings never materialize. One of Schneider's engineers said it would have been cheaper overall to just let us freely idle the trucks with an MPG bonus. EPUs with opti-idle have lower entry costs, lower maintenance costs, and lower operations costs. I don't like them and if I were ever to buy a truck I would spec out a diesel APU, trading cost for comfort.

 

If I were an o/o I would certainly be going the home brewed Epu route, battery technology has improved drastically since the epu I had at Maverick 13 years ago.

I went with a bluetti 3kw battery and a portable ac unit for my pilot truck. Might eventually add a solar panel but even with out it I should get 10+ hours of ac and have enough to brew some coffee in the morning.