I got a call from dispatch around 11:00 this morning. She had found a partial load for me to pick up about 1.5 hours from my house going to Iowa. Cool.

The plan was for me to go and pick it up and then as it doesn't need to be in Iowa until Monday morning just return home to wait for her to find something else to fill out the load. Sounded like a plan to me.

I called the shipper and set everything up. He said to come in around 1:00 PM. No problem. After eating an early lunch I went out to my truck to make the drive over there. I climbed in the truck, turned the key, and nothing happened. Oh shit.

A quick check of the voltmeter confirmed what I already knew; the batteries were dead. Really dead. Like, not so much as a spark in them. This isn't supposed to happen. The truck has circuits that kill all accessory power when the voltage drops to a certain point in order to preserve enough to start the engine.

I've left the truck sit for more than two weeks and it fired right up. I am guessing that one of the four batteries has a short in it and that is what drained them all.

I then thought Hey! I'll just fire up my APU generator, that'll throw some juice into the system. I was hoping there was just enough of a charge left in the batteries to turn over the small deisel engine. No such luck. Not even a whimper from it. Damn!

Well, I called our shop and they called the nearest truckstop with road service. While I sat and waited for road service to come out and give me a jump start I made contact with the shipper and let him know I wouldn't be able to make the pick up today as planned. He's a nice guy, said he understood, and that tomorrow would be just fine with him. In his words "As long as it's out of here before next year I'm happy".

So an hour and a half and $130 later I had my truck started and running again. I let it run for a little while and then fired up the APU. I shut down the truck engine and returned home, leaving the APU running to finish recharging the batteries over night so the truck will be ready to roll tomorrow when I am.

When I make it back up to the yard next wekk I'll have them check out the batteries and replace one or all of them as needed. I have no idea how long there may have been a bad battery in the system as I normally fire up the APU when I park the truck for the night. Could be the APU has been compensating for the problem for a while now.

Ah well, tomorrow is another day and I'll take another shot at it.