Future Fleets

Business owners keep an open mind about hybrid vehicles while pursuing varied strategies to keep fuel expenses reasonable

There was at least one hybrid truck on the floor at last year’s Pumper & Cleaner Environmental Expo International. It’s a new concept in an industry where the jobs are big and the rigs are bigger. Still, it’s an idea whose time has come.

Business owners and fleet managers, like everyone else, are still dealing with high fuel prices. Though they may question the ability of hybrid and alternative-fuel vehicles to provide the power, longevity and convenience they need, their pain threshold has opened their minds to the possibilities.

“Unfortunately our industry has not introduced hybrids yet, but I’ve got an open mind,” says George Leck, co-manager of Lang Industries on the New York-Pennsylvania border, about 35 miles northeast of Scranton, Pa. “If they do, I’ll definitely take a look.”

Leck’s colleague, Gary Keen, says the company is trying as hard as possible to cluster service calls to create more efficient routes and conserve fuel, but that has limited effect. “You try to plot logical routes and make sure a guy’s not going all over the territory, but when it comes to emergency calls, there’s not much you can do.” So both men are open to whatever gas-saving technology may come their way.

Eugene Marko, co-owner of Marko Septic Service on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border, believes hybrid vehicles and alternative fuels are just one response to expensive fuel. He thinks a more immediate and effective solution is to outfit existing vehicles with more efficient engines.

“The Mercedes engine, developed in Europe, can already get better economy there than it can here,” he says. “They have higher pollution standards, so it has to perform better.” Son John Marko concurs. “We could do that same thing here, but we don’t,” he says.

Mark Stone and Rick Elmore are partners in Carolina Septic Inc., not quite a year old, in North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad region. They launched their septic and grease trap pumping, jetting and industrial waste loading business on their belief in the strength of technology. They have more than a passing interest in any technological solutions to the high cost of fuel.

The men say they’re open to hybrids and other alternative-fuel solutions and believe such technology can be engineered to perform as well as straight gasoline or diesel vehicles. However, they haven’t heard of any such vehicles being offered, so they’re pursuing other measures.

“One thing we’re doing is getting a higher-capacity truck, because one of the places we’re burning a lot of fuel is going up and down the road to the waste treatment site to dump the effluent,” explains Stone. “That can be as much as an hour on the road for the truck.

“What we have now is a truck that can handle two loads. What we’re moving toward is one that can hold at least four loads. I’m trying to legally have a truck that can hold five, so that we’ll stay in the field longer servicing job-to-job before having to offload. Then when we do have to spend an hour on the road, it’s dumping five loads instead of two, so we’ll get our efficiency there.”

Another route to efficiency is finding a smaller truck to use for jobs like grease trap pumping. “Conversely, to look for a larger pumper truck, we don’t always need the high capacity for the other things we do,” Stone says. “We service grease traps that are 50 to 100 gallons.

“We package some deals for a few of the local restaurants who have multiple locations. They may have one or two restaurants that are one or two hours away from our location, but the package contract allows us to service four or five that are nearby.

“Instead of sending a large truck there, we’re looking forward to having our fourth truck be a smaller type with better gas efficiency, so when we do have to travel or do a smaller tank, it makes more sense,” Stone explains. “Overall, we’re trying to balance our fleet so that when it’s cost-effective to use a big truck, we’ll do it, but when we can use a smaller one, we’ll do that instead.”

Elmore is researching dispatching software that will help the company make better routing decisions and provide accurate guides for drivers. “We come from a professional background where we’ve seen that if you measure something, it gets better,” he says, “so that’s our company’s philosophy. What are the factors driving fuel use? Let’s measure it and figure out how to make it better.”

The firm now does manual dispatching but is looking at a GPS-integrated software system that will take the guesswork out of driving the routes. “What I’ve found just monitoring the routes for two weeks is that frequently, the drivers get confused and they have to pull over and turn around,” says Elmore. “Turning around, to me, just spells wasted fuel, not to mention how much wasted time it means for that driver. A GPS dispatch system that helps us measure where the waste is occurring helps us eliminate it.”

But for the future, are hybrids in the picture for Carolina Septic? Bring it on, say Stone and Elmore. They’re ready for technology to do its part.



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