SIDEBAR: Testing Your Own Trucks

The Ontario Ministry of the Environment is accepting “expressions of interest” from heavy-duty service shops-including fleet garages-that want to become an accredited Drive Clean testing facility, or DCF. To qualify, shops will need to install testing equipment that meets government specs, train and certify staff to do the test and make repairs, and agree to comply with a set of standard operating requirements.

The process is usefully summarized in a vest-pocket-size brochure called “A Few Good Shops Will Make All The Difference,” available from the Ministry’s Drive Clean Office at 40 St. Clair Avenue W., 4th floor, Toronto, ON M4V 1M2 (or call 416/314-5861). The same office provides the expression of interest form.

For a lot of interested shops, the big concern is hardware, which must be provincially approved and can be expensive.

“We expect to have a list of approved test equipment finalized by mid to late June,” says John Steele of the Ontario Ministry of Environment. Specifications for training and accrediting staff will follow.

Several companies market opacity-testing equipment. One, SPX Canada of Markham, Ont., has delivered 11 units to prospective DCF operators. The company makes testing equipment in Europe through a British subsidiary. “We’re using their expertise to produce a tester for Ontario,” says Tim Toushan, emissions manager at SPX Canada. “But our overall opacity-testing package is so new that we haven’t even assigned an official product name to it yet.”

Diane Cook, vice-president of marketing at Irving, Calif.-based Red Mountain Engineering Inc., takes pride in the fact that two of Ontario’s four Smog Patrol vehicles are equipped with her firm’s “Smoke Check 1667” battery-powered portable unit.

“Our design incorporates automatic data-input and calculation of ambient temperature, barometric pressure, and relative humidity,” she says, “so you don’t have to enter these variables yourself and do a calculation to get an opacity percentage. Operators really like the fact that Smoke Check does this for you.”

The equipment doesn’t come cheap, however. One veteran player in the emissions game estimates that it will cost from $22,000 to $30,000 to acquire the basic equipment, and that doesn’t include government facility-accreditation fees or the cost of training staff.