Proactive Maintenance Strategies to Beat the Heat with AVM

When unpredictable summer weather catches your agency’s maintenance teams off guard, uncomfortable temperatures onboard quickly lead to rider complaints, which are often voiced publicly. Angry posts about passengers sweating start to trend on social media, drawing unwanted attention to your agency.

But you can change the narrative. By leveraging the data you already collect in your AVM system, you can proactively prepare your fleet for extreme heat and intercept issues before they put your agency in the hot seat.

Preparing for Extreme Heat with a Proactive Maintenance Plan

If you operate in an area where extreme heat regularly impacts your community, even routine maintenance tasks can have serious impacts. A bus breaking down on a mild day may only be a minor inconvenience for riders. But a bus stranded in extreme heat can quickly escalate to become a major safety and customer service situation. Identifying an issue before it escalates to a critical level is crucial to preempting potential nightmare scenarios at your agency and improving overall day-to-day customer satisfaction.

AVM can help your agency pivot from a reactive maintenance strategy to one that employs more proactive tactics to keep your fleet up and running during any kind of weather. By eliminating the likelihood that a vehicle in need of repair will go out on the road on any given day, road calls can be reduced by up to 40%. A proactive maintenance plan can also help your agency reduce costs by enabling effective scheduling and management of maintenance and reducing overtime pay for unplanned or emergency maintenance.

Using AVM to Stay Calm and Cool in Summer Temperatures

As climates worldwide are shifting, extreme summer temperatures are impacting more and more communities. Will your agency be ready for a prolonged heatwave, temperature extremes, and other hazards? As with any effective maintenance plan, proactively addressing potential problems will pay off exponentially when hot weather enters the picture.

For agencies in the southern half of the United States, summer preparations begin in the spring, well before many of us are ready to start thinking about being stuck to our seats in a hot vehicle. Fleet norms are aggregated via reports in AVM, allowing maintenance teams to identify buses that deviate from what is considered acceptable. Performance data, average coolant temperature, and bus temperatures are measured and reported, allowing maintenance to single out buses for service well ahead of the first heatwave.

A vehicle’s onboard HVAC system allows mechanics to lock in the temperature at a standard setpoint, much like in a home HVAC system. If an operator feels the bus temperature is not cool enough, they can override the setpoint onboard the vehicle. Sometimes, even though the temperature is set to what should feel comfortable, the HVAC unit may not be putting enough cool air into the bus to reach the setpoint accurately. This could be due to a bad compressor or other mechanical issues within the HVAC unit itself. On buses with intake and outtake temperature sensors, AVM can report on that sensor data to determine whether an HVAC unit is putting out enough cool air in the summer or heat in the winter. This allows maintenance teams to see immediately where potentially bad HVAC units are within their fleet and perform the appropriate preventative maintenance before the customer complaints begin.

Vehicle Health Monitoring Solutions from Clever Devices

AVM gives agencies the tools and technology needed to diagnose and triage buses instantly, saving time and labor costs. Learn more about how AVM can help your agency employ a more proactive maintenance strategy.