Whenever I get a whiff of ether starting fluid, my mind races back to my earliest days in trucking. I worked for an outfit that had a fleet of late 1970s-vintage 290-
and 350-horsepower Cummins engines. Those things wouldn’t start for love nor money when the temperature dipped below freezing. Getting them going was a team operation–the driver inside working the air-starter button and holding the footfeed to the floor while a mechanic emptied a can of ether into the air intake. Most of the time it worked and the engines roared to life.

Sometimes they just roared. With a great bang and a cloud of foul gray-black smoke, those engines would come apart fairly frequently. So often, in fact, it seemed to be a cost of doing business. Under the circumstances, it made sense to leave the things running from October to May.

Today’s electronic engines will start down to minus-25 F and beyond, almost guaranteed. Which begs the question, why leave the things running when the temperatures are hovering in the 10- to 15-degree range? That’s perfect sleeping weather. Maybe you need a thicker blanket, but it just doesn’t get any better.

The spring and fall were always my favourite times of year because you could sleep with the engine off, the windows open, and enjoy a big, bug-free, dose of silence–until a reefer parked
beside you.

Sometime back in the
mid-1980s I came across what I believe might be the most useful device ever invented for the over-the-road driver: the 12-volt mattress pad heater. Bar none, that old mattress pad heater saved me more money than any other gizmo I ever purchased.

It cost a mere 50 bucks. I could leave the truck shut off to well below zero and sleep toasty and warm all night. I used several blankets, including an unfolded sleeping bag on the colder nights, and woke on several occasions with frost on the upholstery screws inside the sleeper. But I was baking away under the covers, warmed from below by my mattress pad.
I can also swear that never once did I wake to a dead battery. And that was before they invented the low-voltage battery-disconnect switches that are popular today.

I learned early in the game to bring my pants and shirt under the covers with me, where it was warm. Putting on jeans chilled to well below freezing isn’t a pleasant experience.
And I also invested in a remote sleeper starter switch for the truck. I’d fire it up, snooze for another 15 minutes and crawl out from under the blankets to a modestly warmed cab.
Net cost for a warm night’s sleep? About a nickel (the cost of the mattress pad amortized over two years).

You’ll notice that we don’t have any mattress pads advertised in the magazine, so you can’t accuse me of putting in a good word for our sponsors. I just want to share a cost-effective way of getting a sound, comfortable sleep for next to nothing, and with next to no fear of not starting up in the morning.

With the cost of diesel poised to soar beyond a buck a litre over the winter, we should all be looking for alternatives to running a 500-hp furnace all night long. And yes, I’m more than a bit concerned about air-quality issues. I’d rather sleep on a remote roadside pull-out than in a truck stop parking lot shrouded in a pall of exhaust, surrounded by the roar of several hundred idling diesels.

On a larger scale, though,
a busy truck stop like the Flying J in Brookville, Pa., where I spent a night while testing a Mack Vision a few weeks ago, could easily be pumping 200 gallons of fuel an hour into the air. The evening temperature was a comfortable 60 F, but three-quarters of the trucks in the lot were left running over night. That’s just plain silly.

For less than the cost of one night in a motel, or about three nights of idling, you can wrap yourself in a thick blanket and drift off to sleep–even on a cold night–warmed from below by your thermostatically controlled electric mattress pad. Available at most thoroughly polluted truck stops.