During Summer I have some buses that if they sit for weeks will have totally drained systems .I realize there might be something draining these . What I am thinking is about trickle chargers .Are there any districts that do this ? If so how do you do it and what brand ? Or is this something that only happens to a few and I just need to find out what's wrong instead of a band aid job ? Thanks
With radios, Cameras, Engine electronics and maybe heaters there are lots of little draws. I just start any troublesome buses once a month. Kick up the idle and let them run for half an hour.
In the summer we switch off master disconnects or circuit breakers on buses that aren't running. 2 weeks before school we fire everything off and if it won't start we address it then. We too let the buses run for a while. Usually about 5 buses out of 150 won't start.
We don't have no starts on the first day of school if we do this.
I use the master switches and I also test all batteries on my summer check. I replace anything that is 55% or lower on "battery health". I use a Solar tester. Testing has all but eliminated battery failures during the school year.
We have a small fleet of 16. Between summer special ed class routes, needing to move them to get to other things stored in each garage, and summer maintenance/cleaning on each one, none of our buses go longer than 3-4 days without being started during summer. I don't know if you would call us lucky or not.
Some of the large fleets out west are using small solar panels that are easily added to the roof of a bus with a charge controller in the battery box. You can put a setup like this on a bus for about a 150 bucks. Check out these links. I know some districts are putting these in their bid specs now. I am kind of surprised none of the bus manufacturers have offered something like this as an option.
We are using the NOCO battery maintainers and ha little trouble the first year, but this year we found several batteries low on acid and determined that having them plugged in all the time was bad. We have a fancy lighting control system in our new facility and I had them wire all of the maintainer outlets to this and set time on and time off for each outlet. Now they run twice a week for 4 hours each and we have buses that start when needed, but not the battery issues. I think any maintainer should be checked for constant operation and limited.
If it's important enough to tell me about, it's important enough to create an issue.
Preventing dead batteries during Summer ?
Posted - 07/11/2018 : 11:18:46 AM
