What's up with all the trucks idling?

I never seen one work well.

 

with a busted tripac alternator i took advantage of the opportunity to test the survivability of a non-climate controlled truck sleeper in 90 - 100 degree F weather for about three weeks. As long as you drink enough water to keep sweating and as long as you ingest enough electrolytes to hold a charge, making it through a 10 hour break without AC is manageable, but it's pretty taxing in a way that normal work day functionality has to get slowed down a lot afterwards until you can recover. depending on how well u stay hydrated and if you're able to still eat, getting started for a shift afterwards can be akin to geriatric roleplay.

the biggest danger with high temps is if you stop sweating, the skin starts to get really hot really fast and if you can't start sweating again or if you can't get out of the heat and u stay dry, u r forked. brain goes kaput and organs start shutting down pretty quick, you don't want to be dozing off like that.

up to 100 degrees F ambient in Arkansas/Louisiana, just with the two sleeper vent doors open, one Lasko Power Plus box fan at one end of the bed by feet and one milwaukee M18 battery powered jobsite fan pointed straight at face/torso, no problem laid out sweating buckets. eating thermotabs like candy and drink about a gallon of water every four hours.

Columbia PFG fishing shirts are obscenely effective in this scenario, with bare skin the sweat just rolls off into mattress puddles and doesn't do jack, with a long sleeve PFG fishing shirt the omni-wick material stays saturated and clings to the skin, when you point a fan at it the evaporative cooling is like wearing an air conditioner. Above 100 degrees F once it gets to a certain humidity inside, blowing the saturated humid air at any speed stops cooling at all, it helps to crack the front widows at that point to get the humidity down below 100%.

there is a euphoria associated with the body's response to long duration high temperatures that i'm wholly addicted to now. Wim Hof talks about the deep freezing cold invigorating the life in the body if you don't resist it and keep breathing, with high temps there is a point where you start to feel waves of euphoria hit you as the body gets put into mechanical survival mode. for the same reason people go to a sauna, just lower temp / longer duration.

i used to start sweating profusely inside the cab at about 79 F ambient...after three weeks of 10 hour daily saunas it's 85 F ambient and I barely sweating at all without AC.

biggest issue long term without AC is a wet mattress that stays wet, you can't hang it up with towels and shirts. one shift isn't enough time for it to completely dry after taking so much sweat, after about four days it starts to sour. I got a tarp to put between mattress and towels, so just towels get soaked, but that net effect is to reduce any airflow you had with the mattress to zero, feels like being a gdmn hot dog in foil. if forced again i'd ditch the mattress and put a low pro cot + towels.

 

Why in the hell would you not just idle?

 

fancy, we have hammers to wedge between the throttle and brake pedal for the trucks that don’t have a throttle lock

 

idling with a 1-box is willful suicide, in jan 2019 in chicago during the polar vortex i idled for 18 hours when it got down to -10, but only because my un-maintained espar finally flamed out at -10 and i wasn't ready to die yet

 

I think the early emissions trucks got everybody on edge. I got a emissions truck and idle. 130k not even a hint of an issue. No sensors or forced regen. If a issue would occur I’d fix it like everything else. No sweating or worries. Too easy.

 

My truck ran all night last night, still only the second time I’ve idled all night because of the heat. Makes 5 nights idling so far this year, so I guess that’s why I haven’t spent the money on an APU.

 

I get it!
I have an emissions truck and hate to idle cause the fear of damage to the DPF system. However my APU blew a coolant hose and I #### sure didn’t bake…. I idled for a few nights til I could fix it.

 

I still use them on two trucks. They work great on mechanical Cats, but years ago running a BC 4 you would set the idle and go to bed. You might wake up with it against the governor or it might be at dead idle. I could never figure it out.

 

so, remove it.