New battery-powered aux A/C promises better ROI for small fleet with portability

Todd Dills: Well, you’ve got the inside scoop. You know what this truck is called? What's the name of this truck?

Jamie Hagen: Yeah, I can’t tell you.

Todd Dills: Yeah, I tried, but Jamie Hagen wouldn't divulge the name of the new Mack tractor set to be debuted in April in New York. And this year of Mack’s 125th anniversary as a company. Small fleet owner Hagen does indeed have the inside scoop on the unit as I suggested up top, a brief excerpt of our conversation last week. He’s actually driven one hand built production model already around the company’s test track hidden behind the walls. And come June he expects to be leasing one of the first production units in an arrangement with Mack’s marketing arm. It’ll add to his all-Mack fleet Hell Bent Xpress, among finalists in 2024 for Overdrive Small Fleet Championship. Regular readers and listeners here will recall.

Jamie Hagen: Each dealership is going to get one and then I'm gonna get one. So they had a certain slot at the very beginning. So I'll get my first truck in June. Dealers will start seeing them at the end of May. I think they start building them and then mine gets built in June so I should get it, you know, before July. Somewhere in there like there's this whole gray area but I'm like in the first hundred, first hundred units.

Todd Dills: That unit will add one to his South Dakota based small fleet's power unit count. Currently sitting where it was back when we last spoke around the Small Fleet Champ program's conclusion in November at nine.

Jamie Hagen: Toughing it out at nine. When Mack sends me this new truck we'll be back at 10.

Todd Dills: I'm Todd Dills and there's big things ahead for Hagen and Hell Bent Xpress, it’s certain, yet the new Mack wasn’t the principal reason I wanted to bring him on for this edition of Overdrive Radio for 3-3-2025. Rather, the forward-looking small fleet owner happens to be the first US owner to install a new to the US auxiliary air conditioning unit in the sleeper of one of his Macks. Thats the Fresco 9000 maxx unit built by an Italian manufacturer and powered by US based Dragonfly Energy’s Battle Born Batteries Lithium iron phosphate battery to deliver cooling power in the warmer months. Today in the podcast Hagen walks us through the unit design and along the way his rationale for jumping into the modular portable system after years foregoing alternative air conditioning for his mostly upper Midwest regional fleet.

Yes, he’s got auxiliary heat in the form of Webasto bunk heaters.

If you’ll be in attendance at the big Mid America Trucking show later this month. Hagen will be part of a panel discussion opening the event on Thursday, March 27 about small trucking business issues that also features a past Overdrive Small Fleet Champ in Silver Creek Transportation. Jason Cowan, and many others. Find information about that via a link in the show notes for what is essentially an opening breakfast at the convention center that also features representatives from FMCSA. Hagen wasn’t quite sure what all he was going to do to prepare. Studying up on regulatory issues might not be one among those activities, he guessed, illustrating that though Hagen may well be a business owner with his eyes on the future, especially when it comes to fuel economy and the latest truck equipment, he's got a lot of the same frustrations as many a truck driver on the road today.

Jamie Hagen: I don't know if me studying up on the regulations is going to help anybody, not when you have the FMC guys there. You know, I mean, I just look at him and say, you tell me what it means. Because you know, it's always up to interpretation. That's the thing I hate the most about our industry is each individual a law enforcement officer gets to interpret the law the way they see fit. You can go through it afterwards if you disagree with how they interpreted it, but that doesn't mean you don't get stopped on the side of the road and put out a service until they deem otherwise. I've had plenty of guys, you know, get tickets for some of the simplest things and I'm just like, really? It's kind of a loose interpretation of it. But you know, what are you going to do.

Todd Dills: After the break: How a 2023 Mack anthem in the small fleet of Hellbent Xpress came to be the first truck to get an installed Fresco 9000 Maxx battery powered alternative Air Conditioning system performed, by the way, by Jim Fowler and his team at Michigan Md. Alignment. Keep Tuned.

Speaker 3: Did you know Today's Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel is robbing your engine of vital lubricity? Howes Diesel Defender is here to help. Formulated for diesel engines of all types and sizes, Defender adds lubricity back into your fuel, protecting your engine from wear and tear, while specialized IDX4 detergent keeps your engine clean and running strong. Plus enjoy guaranteed 5% boost in fuel economy or more while powering up performance. Howes Diesel Defender, your ultimate engine protector.

Todd Dills: You can find more about the Howes company's full line of warm and cold weather fuel treatments like Diesel Defender at the company website. That's HOWES HowesProducts.com.

Here's Hellbent Xpress 9 truck small fleet owner Jamie Hagen harking back to late summer, early fall, and the heavy duty trucking exchange event where he met some of the people from Dragonfly Energy who would ultimately lead him on to the Fresco 9000 Maxx system.

Jamie Hagen: Really, it kind of started from, attending the, HDTX Heavy duty Trucking Exchange. You know, they do kind of like a round table with these people, and one of them was Dragonfly Batteries.

 And really, it caught my attention because I didn't. … You know, I've heard a lot about lithium batteries and trucks. I haven't seen a lot of stuff. so those guys gave me a lot of information. I said, man, you know, these battery sound great. Like, do you have anything to, like as far as air conditioning systems that you use for them? He's like, well, we're talking to this company, Climo Pizo, you know, out of Canada, and they, you know, we'll get them in touch with you. And that's kind of how it happened. they just kind of found me.

Todd Dills: You found each other, sounds like basically. So you just installed one in one truck or you going in all of them?

Jamie Hagen: So far, we got one.

That's all we’ve got. We're working on another one we haven't tested yet. Like, we put it in the middle of, you know, just an absolutely kick you in the donkey cold winter. So it's literally never been turned on since we tested it after, you know, installing it.

So, I'm hoping here it's gonna get a little warmer. And I just told my guy, just use it even if you're not. Even if you're not, you know, cold or warm, you know, just turn it on, see if that thing works.

Todd Dills: It's kind of warm down here this week, in the south. I don't know if he comes down here, but.

Jamie Hagen: Well, yeah, I got him headed to Ohio from, Nebraska, which is kind of a lateral move. But, you know, we've heard, you know, the guy that installed it, Jim Fowler, he went, up to Canada and trained on how to install them. And the company up there that taught him how to install them said they've installed 200 of them already, all Canadian trucks. And they, you know, run down the United States, so they get a fair amount of use of them in the summer. And they said that the guys just love them. Like, they've never had one go bad, never had a guy complain, and they've been running for two years. So that made me feel a little better to, you know, Nez are mechanics who, you know what I mean, they ain't got no reason to, you know what I mean? Like these two guys, they're just too lonely mechanics and they couldn't speak highly enough about the system. So that made me feel a lot better like just the fact that we got some pretty good glowing reviews. You with 200 installs. You know.

Todd Dills: As noted prior, Hagen's Hellbent Xpress is an entirely Mack fleet. And this unit is installed in the bunk of one of his 2023 model Anthem tractors. After previously having zero auxiliary cooling at all, Hagen's operators used a webasto fuel fired heater for warmth in the colder months.

Jamie Hagen: I kind of started off small, mainly running the Midwest, right, Like really focusing on the Midwest, doing tankers. Well, I mean it does get warm up there, but how many times where you can't open your windows, you know in your sleeper we have the bunk heaters. Yeah, we had the Waato bunk heaters. Yeah. So that was our main concern. And to me I always did the math and it never quite panned out financially. You know, in my mind adding another small engine that needed maintenance never really made sense like it was. I'm m just like all I'm doing is transferring the bill to this other thing, you know, maybe I was wrong, I don't know. But we got by all these years and now this feels like a real good solution. Like no oil changes, great reliability, all those things you want quiet. My God, I cannot stand those little generator motors just putzing away right beside you. So yeah, to me this is like just a perfect scenario.

Todd Dills: And they have good warranty coverage on their batteries, don't they?

Jamie Hagen: Batteries, a crazy 10 year warranty.

Todd Dills: The particular battery in use here is the Dragonfly Energy Company's Battleborn Batteries's lithium iron phosphate design below the bunk of the Mack truck.

Jamie Hagen: Now I can't really speak to much more than Mack truck, right, because that's the whole kind plate. You open the bunk, the bed slides up and then there's a compartment right in the middle. The under bunk area is made up of three compartments and there's one kind of dead center that's mainly used for like bulk storage. You know, like you would just throw some clothes in there or something, you know. We were able to put the two big lithium batteries right in there and then the condenser for the AC unit and then we just ran the hoses and the wires like out the back and then around, and then it just follows up the back of the cab. And then right at the very top, there was a cabinet about head high, and it sits on top of that. So it's literally at the top of the sleeper where the blower is, which is a huge thing. I have come to find out. The ones that typically mount right on the back wall of the sleeper, you know, it just doesn't have enough oomph to get the cold air up in the air. You know, this cold air falls, you know. So it's my understanding these things actually cool the truck better because they're able to mount them so high. Kind of a modular design, too. So it comes in these two pieces. The Heatso unit is only two units. You know, the batteries are separate unit, and then you got the wires and hoses that hook up to it. There's a fan on the outside. There's the third unit I was talking about. There's a fan on the outside to cool the condenser. But that condenser is like the size of a lunchbox. You know, it's super small and convenient. That's the one thing that kind of blew my mind is how small the unit was. The batteries are what take up the most room in the whole unit. And if you could mount those outside the truck, then you freed up all. You know what I mean? You've almost taken almost no room at all inside the truck, which is kind of a big deal too.

Todd Dills: I mean, is that doable, exterior installation somewhere?

Jamie Hagen: They tell me you can get a battery box, aluminum battery box for around five hundred. To mount it outside, you just mounted them inside. Cause I thought it would make it super easy on the install. And, drivers seemed to be happy with it. Everything was okay with it. It'd be great if they were just a smidge smaller and they could free up just a little bit more room. So I'm contemplating having them outside still. Just contemplating. The only upside to them being inside is you don't have to worry about them freezing in the winter. Not that lithium freezes, but it definitely diminishes the power range. We really don't need power in the winter.

They're mainly used to run, the. They're gonna actually hook this up. We got a system to hook those batteries back into my starter battery. So in the winter, we could shut the truck off. The batteries would be constantly being charged from the lithium batteries. The whole Time they're parked. So you know, that's the thing that gets batteries the most. The winter is the cold. So they would always be charging, running the heater off of it as well. So if they go dead, you know the truck battery is always good and juice so it can just start right up. So there'll be a win win summer and winter with these things. It would, you know, it run your, your refrigerator, it would run your webato cabin heater and it would charge the batteries for the entire truck, keeping them warm, you know, juiced. So that way, you know, as soon as you turn the key on the morning it just fires right up and then the rest of the day you're charging back what you, what you stole in the night.

Todd Dills: it's connected to the truck's electrical system being charged off the alternator kind of thing.

Assuming most of the components stand the test of time, if a battery with a warranty, a 10 year warranty on it, and you don't have to put. Doesn't sound like there's probably going to be much, not any kind of frequent maintenance on these. Right?

Jamie Hagen: Shouldn't be any maintenance of any kind other than keeping the lower motor clean. You know, I mean charge of the AC system maybe that's about it.

Todd Dills: That'll save some time spent idling for sure.

Jamie Hagen: And it's modular so you can move it. That was the one thing that really sold me on it was the fact that, you know, yeah, we're gonna have some mounting holes, you know, in the older truck but like if we go to move to a new truck, we can just take the whole system with us instead of losing the money. You know. That was the thing that really used to drive me insane was like unless you bought a brand new truck with an APU on it, you know, you didn't really get your money back in time. You know, becausee the things are so expensive, it's hard to recoup the cost.

Todd Dills: You buying these trucks new, right? The Macks that you've got today. They probably do have I'm guessing, battery systems that they offer on those trucks that are enough for climate control.

Jamie Hagen: They just started doing it from the factory and there again that's one of those units they mount right on the back of the sleeper. And then the, you know, they cut a hole and the thing comes through, you know, you're never getting rid of this, you know what I mean? Because they the cut a hole in the back of the sleeper and it's, you know, it's there for life.

Todd Dills: Now with the Fresco 9000 Max by contrast, and the setup for Hagen's 2023 Mack, a hole the size of a small orange was cut in the floor of the cab through which to run hoses and wires and otherwise mounting screws for mounting brackets take care of the rest of it.

Jamie Hagen: And then the other piece mounts on the floor, the other piece mounts on top of the cabinet. All the hoses and stuff get run through the trim so there's no mounting. And then the cooler on the back of the cab, they just use those nut sets drilled into the back of the cab. So like there's no big holes, there's four holes, that's it that you can fill in or put a bolt in.

Todd Dills: Plan is to just continue to add these as you, as you can get them in the shop, and do it.

Jamie Hagen: Yeah, right now we got we got plans with Jim to get another truck in there. he just got to get the batteries. He's got two or three AC units in stock. And the hard part is getting the batteries from Reno, where Dragonfly is made so they're out there. He’s got one, but he's got to use them for the Mid-America truck show.

Todd Dills: That's right. As noted up top you'll find the Fresco 9000 max lithium iron phosphate battery driven alternative AC system at Mid America. Jim Fowler and other reps from partners to the Heatso distributor will be on hand to explain it at booth number 11168 at the Mid America Trucking show in Louisville, Kentucky. We well be there too of course. On the move, covering the wide array of eventns happening. Dont miss Jamie Hagen as part of the opening breakfast if you’ve added that to your registration. And keep an eye out for 2023 Trucker of the Year, Jay Hostey's 2022 Western Star and its recently added ATG Custom Sleeper at that companys booth too.