Another Sunday

Made it through another week. Went from Las Vegas up to Salt Lake City. Had a Wednesday delivery and got in there noon Tuesday so I went by the terminal in North Salt Lake to see if they would work on the battery problem on the truck.

I had let Kansas City shop work on it 3 days after I got the new truck. They went in and checked and charged the batteries and found no problem. They were going to put me in the Freightliner shop the next day but they had a 3 day wait to get in. I had to run with it.

I thought they would put me into Freightliner there in Salt Lake since that was the plan before, but no. They did the exact same thing they did in KC, checked the batteries. After 6 more hours waiting they had just changed out the batteries and pronounced it fixed. I spent the night on the yard and .... no it didn't.

What was happening was the truck has 2 sets of 4 batteries. The primary set runs the truck and all the plug ins and lights inside. After sitting for 2 hours at night they were shutting down as the truck went into preservation mode to keep the batteries from running completely out. It does that when the voltage reading on the batteries get to below 12 volts. The bunk heater and one or 2 lights inside the bunk run off the secondary set of batteries and they were working just fine. Which is good since I have been in very cold temperatures, but my fridge wouldn't work more than 2 hours once parked, I couldn't idle truck because it won't idle more than 39 minutes to keep the fridge working, plus I couldn't work on computer or watch tv because the outlets were shutting off. Once I idle the truck everything would work for a hour or 2 and off again. Biggest problem, to keep the fridge working overnight I have to get up and restart the truck every hour or two. Couldn't get much sleep that way, so wasn't keeping anything in there that would ruin.

Next morning I went in and told the shop it didn't work, it was a new crew, I went and delivered the load and then returned for them to work on it again. This time I got a mechanic that knew what he was doing. He found a solenoid that was supposed to control which batteries to charge. It was set to charge the secondary instead of the primary set first. Now works fine. All in getting someone who knows what they are doing.

Today I am in Baytown, TX and deliver just after noon at a Sams Club DC in Dayton. Nice and warm 60 degrees yesterday, now a high of 38 today and 20 mph winds. I guess the stuff followed me from Utah!!