Anybody out there have one of these or heard anything good or bad you'd like to share? We're replacing our stolen truck in a couple of days and are looking to put a Comfort Master on. We had a TriPac before and were fairly satisfied with it, but the capabilities of this thing blow any other APU on the market out of the water.

 

The little bit i've heard seems to be good. The guys that run south seem to like them. Did your tri pac keep you comfortable?

 

Well, there were a few things I didn’t like about the TriPac. One of the main things is that we had the “Arctic” package, which is supposed to keep your engine block warm in cold weather. All it did was make the APU run almost constantly in an attempt to keep the engine coolant warm; but when you’d go to start the truck the next morning, it would still take ten minutes for the coolant temp gauge to get into the minimum operating range. The TriPac did keep the batteries charged, but when you’d expect as much given the fact that the generator would run nearly non-stop. Also, in the hottest weather, even with the APU running constantly and a little portable fan going and with sunshades in the windows, we’d still have to start the truck up and let it idle for ten minutes every half hour to keep the temp in the sleeper comfortable. The thermostat for the cabin air seemed to have problems. We’d set the temp for 50 F and the Espar heater would burn us out, even in sub-zero weather. The AC would freeze us if we didn’t keep the thermostat set higher than the temp we really wanted it to be in the truck. Also, the TriPac was a bit noisy. The heat exchanger mounts to the back of the sleeper, and when the AC would kick in, the heat exchanger would really rattle and vibrate.

 

Did you do a price comparision?

 

Well, the TriPac cost us $9800 after tax last April at ThermoKing in Orlando, FL. The Comfort Master we’re getting installed right now in Springfield, MO is supposed to cost right around $10k without tax, but we don’t have the bill yet as they are still working on the installation. They’ve been working on it since yesterday late morning and are supposed to be done by early afternoon today. I have to say that I’m impressed with what I see so far, both with this APU’s features and with the company doing the install (Jenkins Diesel). I’ve been going down to the shop off and on to see what they’re doing. There’s a pile of features that this thing has that I could only wish for with our old TriPac. This unit comes with a 3K watt inverter hooked up to AC outlets both inside the sleeper AND outside by the APU power unit. Also, the oil heater is turned off and on with a light switch from inside the sleeper. That was one of the things that ticked me off about the TriPac… the Arctic feature could not be turned off and on, so you’d end up burning fuel in an attempt to keep the engine warm (130 degrees F) even when it was, say 80 F outside. Another cool feature is that the thermostat is programmable up to 24 different cycles, so you can set the unit to come and off at specified times… not so with the TriPac. One other nice thing is that this new APU can be run from shore power, so when I’m home I can plug in to keep my batteries charged, etc. The one thing I did like about the TK unit is that it could be serviced at any TK location. Comfort Master claims to have 250 service locations currently available with another 250 coming by the end of this year… I guess we shall see.

 

20k in 2 years? how long will it take to get any kind of ROI on that?