Episode 120: Maintenance Best Practices for Keeping Your Fleet On The Road

Listen to this episode of NothingWasted! where you will hear another popular session from WasteExpo, “Maintenance Best Practices for Keeping Your Fleet On The Road.” The speakers dug into how to prevent unscheduled downtime, how to save on maintenance and repair costs, why to plan for maintenance in advance and more.

You will learn from Alex Carrasquillo, Fleet Technology Manager, All Waste Inc.; Ray Hasting, Director of E-mobility / National Vocational Accounts, Volvo/Mack Trucks; and Carl Pezold, Field Service Manager, New Way Trucks / Scranton Manufacturing.

Here’s a sneak peek:

Pezold: For New Way, I do trainings; I go see customers; I look at problems and work on trucks. And one thing I see that’s a dying thing out there is preventative maintenance (PM). When I worked for Waste Management, we had PMs and they were done religiously off of engine hours, and it was recorded. The foundation of your whole maintenance program started with your PM. Now, it’s “do we have time to do a PM?” All of your mechanics should be trained to constantly be inspecting trucks. You want to be in a position where you’re scheduling the work; not that the work is scheduling itself. And when your PM doesn’t get done, or there is no visual inspection of the truck, a lot of repairs will become breakdowns. You want to be in control of it — to control your costs and downtime.

Carrasquillo: At All Waste, we have about 100 trucks, 50 of which are Compressed Natural Gas (CNG). And we’re big on having a well-stocked parts room. The CNG trucks require a lot of maintenance and a lot of parts to keep them running. And it’s hard for dealers in our area to keep all the parts we need. So we stock all the parts I know would down a truck, which has been especially helpful during COVID. My biggest thing for the parts room was making it very visible and well lit. I wanted the mechanics to be able to go in there and, within thirty seconds find the part they want, and be able to get back to work. A lot of parts are on hooks, and the shelves have LED lighting with motion sensors. There are signs on the aisles and signs on the shelves. This is especially helpful for people we have hired right out of school. Everything should also be visible; mechanics should not have to dig through boxes.

Hasting: I think the most heartburn for everybody is aftertreatment. Aftertreatment’s been here since 2008. There’s a lot of updating, a lot of maintenance. It’s important to replace the Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) fuel nozzle and clean Venturi tubes around 900 hours. At 3250 hours, we recommend cleaning the DEF tank neck filter, replacing the DEP pump filter, and draining the DEF tank. And at 4500 hours, we like people to clean the Exhaust Gas Recirculation cooler and clean the DPF.

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