kentucky24 said - "Please tell us more about them"
I never did any food products though the company I worked for did a lot of that. They did commodities like Corn Meal, Flour, Whey, and powdered eggs just to mention a few. The products I hauled were Bentonite which is powered clay, Catalist to refineries, Salt for animal feed, Coal Dust/Sand mix used at foundries, Powered Lime and things of that nature. The food products require a wash out between every load where the non-food sometimes I could go 3 or 4 loads before washing the trailer out.
I have to say that I did a fair amount of deadhead but the loads paid enough to compensate easily. I had one load of caol dust that went from Minneapolis to a foundry in about the center of Michigan and then had to deadhead to a small town just north of Milwaukee for a load of lime dust that went back to Minneapolis. I was out for three days and had to get the trailer washed out but the truck made $2700.00 so I made just over 700 in three days. At first I was going to refuse the load to Michigan until they told me what it paid. They said they new there would be nothing coming out of Michigan so they charge a rate that allows for a 400-500 mile deadhead.
As far as blowing off the loads, It only takes 30 to 90 minutes and I rarely had to wait to unload. The 30 to 90 minutes is dependent on how high you have to lift the product (how tall the silo is) and the size of the blower you have and the size of the off load hose an tube. The pressures are important but only about 15-17 PSI. The pressure only pushes the product from the tank to the tube on the bottom of the trailer but it's the volume of air that you move that determines how long it will take. If you've got a 5" hose and offload tube and the larger blower (I think its 14") and don't have to go higher then about 100 feet you can offload in about 20 minutes once you get used to it. You need to monitor the pressure while you unload but once your used to it you just learn where to set the valves and things go very smooth. Everything I did was loaded from the top and only takes 5-10 minutes. Some trailers have a unit on the back to be able to load itself but I have never done that.
I hope this was helpful.
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Last edited by Shnerdly; 01-01-2009 at 01:41 PM.
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