Stay on top of these 12 PM items to escape big repair bills and frequent downtime.

Kirk Beckham performs brake work at Southland International Trucks in Tuscaloosa. Preventive maintenance scheduled at home costs much less than emergency work on the road.

It’s no secret that emergency repairs far from your home can cost several times the repair bill in your local shop. That premium, plus the efficiency of scheduling preventive maintenance work at your convenience, means you get a great return for the effort put into diligent preventive maintenance. Spending up to 30 minutes a day on pre-trip and post-trip inspections often will uncover repairs that should be addressed at once, as well as items that you can work into your next scheduled maintenance.

“A lot of owner-operators pay attention to their tires and get their oil changed, but there are a lot of other components on the truck that have life expectancies,” says Bill McClusky, maintenance management consultant at ATBS, the nation’s largest owner-operator financial services provider. Planning PM with regard to those life expectancies is “being proactive in maintenance, not reactive,” he adds.

Tire failure

Air pressure that is frequently too high or too low for the loads you’re hauling will end up reducing tire longevity and hurting the casing for retreading.

“An 11R22.5 tire typically will have 110 psi imprinted on the sidewall,” says Tim Miller, marketing communication manager at Goodyear Commercial Tires. “If you’re not carrying a full load, you can probably get away with and maybe improve your tire wear by running 85 or 90 psi.”