Hi I’m fairly new to driving 7.5 tonne grandfather rights and have a question about driving hours.
On several occasions I’ve put my card in at the start of my shift to find that I’ve already done over 2-3 hours driving!
I’ve taken the required daily or weekly rest and not gone over the first 4.5 hours of driving without having at least a 46 minute break the previous shift then maybe driven for 2-3 hours and ejected my card at the end of my shift.
My question is should I change the activity to break before ejecting the card at the end of each shift to clear the 2-3 hours driving I’ve done without having a break:?:
If I’ve done less than 4.5 hours driving in a shift after the first 45 minute break surely I don’t need to clear the driving time by having a 45 minute break before the end of my shift. The only way I can clear the driving time I’ve supposedly done is to have a 45 minute break before the 4.5 hours driving time expires which is crazy because I’ve only done 1.5 hours of driving that shift but shows as 4.5 hours on the tacho
When I downloaded my card at the end of todays’ shift it showed that I had an infringement for insufficient rest from last Friday which I know is false because I took the required 45 minute break after 4 hours and 25 minutes driving. I’ve had at least 45 hours weekly rest between Friday and todays’ shift.
You’ve mentioned Insufficient Rest and then immediately talked about taking a Break after 4h25m driving. Breaks are not Weekly or Daily Rests.
I think your issues are arising because you are failing to account properly for the time off between shifts. How old is the vehicle/tacho you are using? When you put your card in at the start of your shift, are you using the “manual entry” facility to properly record what has happened since you last ejected the card?
I’m not using the manual entry facility to record any time I’m not on shift. I only do manual entry for other work for instance if I start my shift by doing 2 hours other work in the warehouse.
I didn’t realise I needed to do a manual entry for daily and weekly rest!
So I need to do a manual entry at the start of every shift to record daily or weekly rest then!? I thought the tacho would automatically record the time the card wasn’t in between shifts to be rest periods. Could I do a manual entry at the start of the shift to record a 45 minute break to clear the driving time from the previous shift?
Yes I always do the correct end and start of shift routine - country but generally don’t do a manual entry unless for other work.
does it not ask you to confirm your last end of shift and new start of shift ? do a printout and look for errors on there. eg it shows driving time when you were not there, tell you employer
Yes it asks me to confirm the end of last shift - start of new shift. I’ll make sure I do a printout at the start of my shift tomorrow. Still doesn’t explain the driving time carried over from the previous shift I’ll make sure I do a printout at the start of my shift tomorrow and show it to the office. Cheers for the help
As long as the Tacho sees 9 hours + of either POA, BED or ? it will ignore any previous driving time and start again. It seems confirming end of shift and start of shift doesn’t always achieve this.
It DOES help to select BED before ejecting your card. The Siemens manuals tell you to do so. It shouldn’t make any difference but from my experiments it seems it CAN.
You’re issues are definitely related to manual inputs and I would suggest you always carry out a manual input and record your rest - can’t go wrong then can it?
On the older type digital tachos, confirming shift end and shift start times is sufficient - everything in between is ignored.
But with the newer types of tacho heads you have to be careful. You should either do a manual entry to account for all hours between one shift and the next (set it to either Bed or “?” do the latter if you have lots of working days when you are not driving) or be absolutely sure to set it to Bed (or “?”) before you eject the card. Getting into the habit of doing manual entries is possibly best practice though unless you really do have one of those jobs where you always clock off immediately after ejecting your card (and put your card in as soon as you arrive at work).
I always choose to enter the bed or rest symbol, before ejecting my card and have never had a problem, it’s a good habit to get into as is doing a manual entry every time I put my card in.
Manual entries are the way to go.
IF you’re able to eject your card and walk out the gate, great, stick it on bed.
Otherwise, do a proper manual entry for the time between pulling your card on the previous work day and putting the card back in on the next working day.
When you have a 20 min gap between pulling your card and getting in your car due to a stupidly long debrief, or get stuck in the queue to show your licence one morning resulting in an hour between starting work and getting your card in, then you’ll see why you should do it.
(It all goes towards working time, and if you’re not showing it properly, your working time average will be lower than it should be).
1 . Put card in
2 . Do any eateries
3 . WAIT FOR THE CARD SYMBOL TO BE COMPLEAT. Your details and manual enteries are NOT complete until this is showing.
Some where in one of the tachograph hand books it say’ s to place on break / rest before ejecting card , I can’t find this at the moment.
The reason I assume is that if you time out take too long to do manual enteries, it assumes it’s a continuation of the previous duty. Also from the older digi to the newer digi there were glitches.
It does sound like your just ejecting the card whilst on x hammers and when starting again your not identifying what activity you have done when the card is out. Or as I said your not waiting for the pictogram of a card to fully show.
