This Was A New One On Me

As I mentioned in Brett's anniversary post, I've been driving truck for just over 5 years now. As you might imagine, that includes a LOT of driving in winter weather. However, I just had a brand new winter weather related experience I thought might make for a good learning experience for pretty much everyone.

So for the past 3 days, I've pretty much entirely been driving on snowy/icy roads, or roads that were just getting cleaned up. Not fun, but nothing I haven't dealt with many many MANY times.

This morning I left out of Klamath Falls heading towards California, and the roads were finally mercifully bare and dry. A few hours later I needed to use the restroom, so I pulled into the TA in Redding. In the 10 minutes I was inside, my primary air pressure dropped to zero. I started my truck, and pressure started building back up...verrrrrrry slowwwwwwwwwwwly. And I could hear a hissing sound coming from somewhere under my driver's door.

A quick phone call to our roadcall department and a 45 minute wait for the day shift techs at the shop to come in, and I was introduced to the culprit: an enormous mass of accumulated snow, ice, and slush that had built up along the underside of my air tanks. The thing was MASSIVE, easily 3 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 18 inches or more thick. Evidently somewhere between Klamath Falls and Redding it had jiggled itself into just the right position to jam itself into the bleed valve and stick it open.

So from now on, whenever I go around kicking the blocks of slushy snowy skuzz off my truck, I'm going to take an extra second or two to pop open the little door where the DEF filler spout lives and peek down there too.

Just goes to show you never know everything, and you never know what kind of interesting things are going to happen out here.

Wow. Not in a million years...

LOL wow, not sure I would have thought of that myself. interesting read, atleast it wasn't an issue while you were driving that could have been bad.

Thanks for sharing!

I actually worked on a truck just the other day with the Same sort of situation. The driver had pulled the line to drain his air tanks before going inside when he came out and tried airing up his truck it took forever and dropped quickly again. I was honestly looking for some.time going through the steps of what was wrong when I realized I had looked at it about 50 times the moisture that came out of the drain actually froze around the stem causing it to leak past. "There went my efficiency bonus" ...