With the cost of fuel at about four dollars a gallon it’s getting pretty expensive to get a good night’s sleep. My little kitty slurps about a gallon to a gallon and a half an hour at idle. That figures to about (gulp) four to six dollars AN HOUR! The cost for idling all night will pay for a motel room many places. Which, now that I mention it, is what I, and a lot of heavy haulers do on occasion. If you’ll notice there are a lot of daycab heavy haulers. Many of them are not local they’re long haul like us, but use a motel every night.

Personally I don’t like motels, but that’s just me.

So what other options are there?

Well there’s ShorePower and a company that now calls itself ShorePower

I’ve been giving this some serious thought. It’d be quite a bit cheaper and a lot easier than some other alternatives we’ll get to in a minute. To use shore power effectively however you need some “stuff”. Did you ever notice all those RV’s going down the road? They have airconditioner/heaters on the roof. Guess what. The majority of those things DO NOT operate on DC. Some do. The majority of them operate on good ole AC. Alternating current the same as you have at home. They either have an onboard generator OR plug in to “shorepower” at an RV park. All RV parks have shorepower. Why don’t truckstops? Some do, getting to be more of them all the time.

But what about when you have NO electricity? Do what a friend of mine did.

That’s a honda generator.

Little gasoline generators are relatively inexpensive. I’ve seen ‘em in Home Depot from about five hundred up to a couple of thousand. That one there looks like one of the more expensive models.

So, total investment, not counting labor is on the order of one to four thousand dollars. (maybe less, maybe more) depending on how extravagant or how basic you want. A four hundred dollar portable gas generator ,an extension cord or two, and a small electric heater will keep you warm in the winter, keep the truck from freezing (ac block heater) and make coffee…although not necessarily all at the same time. (about five hundred dollars total investment.)

If you do like my buddy (pictured) it’ll cost three or four thousand. Your mileage may vary.

Then there’s IdleAire another type of ShorePower. The Wikipedia article on IdleAire. the google search page on IdleAire. IdleAire is a variation on the basic shore power concept in that it has more “stuff”. Air Conditioning/Heating, TV,Internet and AC. There might be other “brand names” of shore power available I’m not sure. It costs less that $2.00 an hour depending on discounts.

Then there’s the EXPENSIVE option. Truck APU’s

There are a number of them on the market. They START at over five thousand dollars, installed and get more expensive WAY more expensive. They’re the most convenient to operate though. They normally have a switch on the inside of the truck to start/stop and inside controls for heat/air , AC and on rare ocassions , other functions. They also run on truck diesel whereas the small electric generators discussed earlier use gasoline.

What to do….what to do?

Shorepower , of either flavor, isn’t every where yet and probably never will be. Even if they ARE available big loads like I haul often times can’t fit into them.

Gasoline generator/Airconditioner/Heater arrangements are mobile such that they work wherever the truck is, but they’re somewhat inconvenient since they use gasoline, another fuel to mess with. And they probably won’t last a long time either but such a short payback period (how long does it take to payback , say..five hundred dollars at fifty dollars a night? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the student) it doesn’t really matter. When they wear out, scrap em and buy a new one. Kind of like we do with Microwaves, VCR’s, TV’s, come to think of it, most electronic “stuff”.

APU’s are lots more convenient but the payback period is longer and they too start to give trouble after just a few years. They’re too expensive to just scrap so how good is their service network.

Not an easy choice. But what is nowadays?