One of the things that emerges from a study of CSA fleet regulations is that lighting infractions are one of the leading reasons a fleet’s maintenance score can deteriorate. It’s not just that a non-functioning tail lamp is a six point violation—in 2011, lighting violations accounted for four of the top 11 violation categories, or 22.3% of all violations. This adds to the fact that lighting violations are one of the easiest categories to prevent and control. Hard to believe?

Let’s take a look at a medium-sized fleet that uses 100% incandescent stop/tail/turn lamps. A 2,000-trailer fleet has 8,000 stop/tail/turn lamps in circulation. At a 3.5-year average life expectancy per bulb, divided by 365 days per year, that fleet will experience approximately six STT failures per day, which creates more than 2,000 downtime episodes per year. And before all those downtime episodes, there are more than 2,000 chances for an on-the road lighting violation, which could result in a parked truck waiting hours for a $150 road service call.

This, of course, is a tremendous drag on a fleet’s productivity. Not only is there the cost of the new replacement lamp itself, there is the cost of getting the trailer to a maintenance facility to check out the reason for the fault, then to fix the problem—plus the potential delivery delay of the cargo.

This is why many fleets are replacing obsolete bulb lamps with LED technology. However, some fleets still balk at the initial cost of the more expensive LED lamps. They either keep their incandescents in place, putting off replacement until a new batch of trailers is ordered, or try to find the least expensive LED lamps to hold down initial cost.

The key point to realize is that a successful LED conversion program should not be identified primarily as a cost. It’s an investment in fleet operational productivity and company-level profitability with a goal of lowering the number of on-the-road lighting failures and subsequent maintenance events caused by lighting. In other words, the lamp upgrade goal should be increasing overall fleet productivity and profitability. The CSA dividend will come automatically.

If this process is executed correctly, unplanned downtime caused by lighting systems can be reduced to an infinitesimal fraction of the previous program. Here are the characteristics of a successful incandescent to LED lamp conversion program:

• First and most important, the LED lamps chosen should be of the highest quality. When it comes to design sophistication, ruggedness both of structure and electronics, protection from voltage spikes and electromagnetic interference, lens design, mounting design, etc., there are different levels of quality among various lamp designs and among suppliers themselves. The lamps may look the same, but often they don’t perform the same.

• The quality of LED diodes themselves varies tremendously, and so does life expectancy. Low quality LEDs fall out of spec more quickly and start to dim unevenly or just burn out. And the electronics within bargain lamps do not stand up as well to the vibration, corrosion and rigors of the highway environment, causing them to fail significantly more quickly. According to Grote, the company exhaustively tests lamps against all competition and has data to prove it.

• Another issue is the integrity of the harness and the connections both within the harness and between the harness and the lamps. When you invest in LED technology, you want to protect your investment by selecting an entire lighting system as reliable as the LED lamps themselves. Thus the design of the connectors and the number of connections is a concern. There are different connection designs in the marketplace and their resistance to corrosion varies because the designs of the seals between lamp and harness have different characteristics. LED lamp technology can outlast the equipment on which it is installed, so it does little good to source the best lamps and mate them to a connection system that allows corrosion to cause system failure anyway. The goal should be no unplanned downtime due to the entire lighting system.

When fleets conclude that they need to seriously address downtime, productivity and their CSA scores with a comprehensive lighting strategy, they need to invest in their future using investment-quality lighting equipment. A low initial expense strategy usually produces a lower return on the bottom line.  

Information supplied by Tom Draper of Grote.