It is my preference to do most of my long distance traveling at night.
Approaching major cities - ALL the Rest Area’s on the Interstates are FULL to overflowing with OTR trucks getting mandated Rest before attempting to make the pick-ups or deliveries in the cities.
Florida has taken to ‘automate’ the Rest Area occupancy for trucks by having the truck spots with sensors to indicate if they are occupied or vacant and have an electronic sign in advance of the Rest Area to indicate how many spaces are available.
Does it really take that much power to cool a truck’s cab? They can’t do it with an auxillary battery or even a solar battery combo? How do RV’s get away with that setup and truck cabs do not?
In California here’s their anti idling regulations. 5 mins an hour regardless of what the outside temperature is. A cop did the exact same thing as the regulations in San Bernardino a few years ago and filmed it. He was a DOT officer off duty in his squad car. Within 30 minutes he was suffering from heat exhaustion. He was dressed in shorts and a T shirt with all the water and sports drinks possible. He literally almost died trying to obey the regulations that his state imposes on OTR driver’s.
I don’t know what kind of RV you’re thinking of, but every RV or camper I know with air-conditioning either runs a generator or plugs in to the camp power supply. Most people camping with air conditioning are happy to pay the electric fee at the campgrounds. I can’t imagine the weight of an RV or camper with batteries to run an air-conditioner for more than a couple of hours.
California literally tried to require EGR on reefer diesel engines. Then Carrier and Thermo King both told CARB and the EPA if they kept going on this requirements they would pull out of the mobile refrigeration industry worldwide. Which would have been a worldwide disaster of epic proportion.
EGR being a kludged disaster on most smaller diesel engines to begin with. Once effective modulated SCR/DEF became available, any need for it (for a crude attempt at reduction of nominal NO and NO2) went the way of the vapor carburetor for gasoline engines.
Now, the government-required systems that deal with SCR systems when the DEF tank freezes or runs dry are another matter entirely. But still, the ‘same’ fluid formulations used in truck-engine SCR can be tapped for small-genset SCR, and it could be argued that the electrical demand for even a larger sleeper cab are smaller than the output of a typical Oman or equivalent in a RV.
One of the development points of ‘hybrid’ trucks (and for BEV scans, too) was the adoption of strictly electric auxiliaries – shades of the SPV2000, but done right – so that the HVAC heat-pump could be driven equally well from a genset, the traction battery, or some form of shore power without fiddling with switches and settings. However, it would be Just Like California™ to treat a small diesel genset as being tantamount to ‘idling’ for selective persecution.
As a reminder: BMW demonstrated a couple of decades ago that the best use of fuel cells on an automobile was to power all the ‘hotel’ systems, leaving the combustion engine only with a single variable-load alternator for ‘emergency’ use so its output (again like the SPV2000’s) could be used for Ultimate Driving Machine purposes. The argument applies at least equally well to trucks optimized to run in the Democratic People’s Republic of Californika.
Oh Californicated Does treat “Tri-Pacs” just like idling the main engine.
Tri-Pacs are small diesel generators that can supply Electricity, Heat and Cooling for cab/sleeper.
The issue that CARB has with Tri-Pac’s ( other than unadulterated complete Stupidity) is that even though the Tri-Pacs have a much lower volume of exhaust, they have a higher PERCENTAGE of particulate matter
Perhaps CARB et all. seem foolish to you and Harold, but:
A brief background history: We can get a sense of the scale of the problem. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) estimated that over 9,000 deaths in California annually were attributable to particulate pollution. A study from the Clean Air Task Force estimated that about 21,000 people die prematurely each year due to diesel vehicle pollution. A study from the MIT found that air pollution caused about 200,000 early deaths annually in the US, with California being particularly impacted. California has been working to improve air quality since the 1960s,
While Los Angeles still faces air quality challenges, the current levels are significantly lower than in the 1970s. For example, the PM2.5 level in Los Angeles is currently 8 µg/m³, considered healthy and safe, according to a real-time air pollution report. Specifically, PM2.5 pollution has declined by 57% since 1970.
The problem with CARB is that they often concentrate on or mandate the wrong thing.
The ‘logic’ in specifying DPFs (with regen and all the carbon and waste which that entails) was intended to reduce “soot” – visible PM potentially loaded with weird organics. Modern engines produce relatively little unburned hydrocarbon. They do, because their compression ratio is crippled to minimize NOx, emit an awful lot of very fine unburnt carbon (in part because they rotate very quickly and are governed to accelerate against a load) and this is the <2.5 picometer stuff which turns out to be the great latent health hazard from diesel exhaust. The DPF does less than nothing to reduce these emissions, and as they are substantially carbon, the diesel oxidation catalyst doesn’t do much with them either.
Meanwhile, NOx was a God-awful major component of smog in the '60s and '70s. But the principal reason it was so bad was that it reacted photochemically with the lavish unburned hydrocarbons (HC) in contemporary carbureted exhaust. With the rise of computerized direct injection, O2 sensors, and vastly greater fuel mileage, the actual HC emissions, even counting vapors and spills from gas pumping, have dropped very low… meaning that ever-more-draconian NOx (most of which is from the nitrogen in the charge air reacting endothermally) restrictions have relatively less impact on ‘air quality’ than in the bad old days when the sky was the brown of nitrogen oxide.
Now, I’m not saying that without CARB and its ‘California restrictions’ we would not have gotten to current expensive levels of FADEC in cars, trucks, and locomotives. But when the Board starts overregulating gensets simply because they have already banned idling, rather than incentivizing efficient small engines with higher compression ratio and full SCR/DEF with low ammonia slip, they become part of a problem rather than the right solution.
You will not find me arguing CARB shouldn’t exist, any more than I would argue that the Clean Air Act or the EPA should be. I remember what it was like to live in a city with a perpetual grayscale sky, where you gauged air quality by whether you could see as far south as 72nd St. when crossing the George Washington Bridge. It was a red-letter day if you saw down to the Statue of Liberty, and I had not realized you could see as far as the Narrows and the Verrazano Bridge until much later. Now you see it without trouble most days, or regularly could by the time I left in the 1990s.
What I have the objection to is doing stuff ‘because they can’ – like what the EPA did to Electro-Motive over Tier 4 final NOx.
CARB hasn’t just declared war on diesel engines they’ve declared war on oh let’s see here. The maker of Sriracha hot sauce in the past tried to declare dust and sand as environmentally harmful. They went after Walmart for selling hairspray they’ve literally went after Budweisier for production of CO2 at it’s brewery’s.
What’s it going to take for you to realize that excessively tight regulations are counterproductive? We’re almost certainly worse off with the current Tier IV emissions standards as the sale of new locomotives dropped like a rock. It would have been better have kept the Tier III standards and replace more of the older more polluting locomotives.
Look at the motor vehicle market in the US where passenger cars are on the verge of extinction.
Thats because you really never bothered to look. Really not an issue finding an RV these days that can run AC with the engine off. It’s not new technology either.
Charlie what you’re seeing in the railroad industry is exactly what I had tried to warn you about over a decade ago over EGR in a diesel engine. The loss of feul economy yhe losses in reliability the extra maintenance issues. Yet I was told it’s not that bad even as engines were blowing up with less than 50k miles on them.