Truckers Home Away From Home | Green Energy News

July 11, 2004 – Vol.9 No.16

TRUCKER’S HOME AWAY FROM HOME.

Long haul truck drivers put in a work-rest-work schedule like all other working persons. Their work place, however, is also their rest place, and it is mobile. Home is often on the road. So, at rest they want the comforts of home: heat and air conditioning, access to communications, and electric power for whatever.

For the most part when truckers stop for a rest period - day or night - they leave their engines idling to generate power and run internal heating and air conditioning systems. But idling an engines for 40-60 percent of the time in a day wastes fuel and creates air pollution at truck stops and beyond.

There have been efforts, in the past, to electrify parking places at truck stops or to add clean power generators to trucks. Both were too expensive.

Now the solution is simpler, yet adds conveniences not available with the other solutions: Attach a hose through a truck window to pump warm or cool air into the cab and within that hose connect the driver to power and to the outside world.

In a $3.5 million cost-shared project, 150 truck stop spaces along Interstate 85 in the South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia will be equipped with IdleAire Technologies’ heat-ventilating-air conditioning-power-communications system.

Truckers, after connecting the data-power-HVAC hose (the company can’t find an easy way to describe it either), can swipe a credit card for thermostatically-controlled comfort. AC power, Internet access, and phone line are all available for about $1.25 hour. For cold weather operation (for truckers worried about shutting down their engines in sub-zero temperatures) an additional AC outlet is provided to plug in engine block heaters.

Financing for this project came from a $1.5 million grant from the National Association of State Energy Officials and $2 million from IdleAire themselves. The company says it already has other installations in Atlanta, Georgia, Arkansas, California, New York and Tennessee. Visit IdleAire at http://www.idleaire.com/ .