Saturday morning saw me having a long (and boring) wait for my first drop to open. Turned up at 7:15, put the digi tacho onto break for 40 minutes as I didn’t want to reset my time, just get my 15 min break in and pass the time for the WTD. After 40 minutes I put it onto Other Work to end the break for about 5 mins, then thought I’d use POA just so I could look at a different symbol for once (poa requirements all met). Tacho cleverly added my 40 min break and my 20 min POA together to total 45 mins break and reset my time.
I took a printout and worked out how much driving I actually had left before my 4.5 was up. So according to the screen I had a new 4.5 driving block available but printout said about 2 hours. Within the next 2 hours I took another 45 break (split 15+30) to reset what the screen said and to reset my actually driving time.
Did I need the 45 or would the tacho have reset after a 30 min break? For the sake of 15 minutes I thought it was best to keep the card clean and so I don’t give the TM the pleasure of seeing an infringement on the download programme .
POA resets the driving time that’s shown on a digital tachograph but legally it makes no difference to what driving time you have left, you could have had 30 minutes instead of the 45 and it would have been legal for you to do another 4.5 hours driving.
If you had taken 30 minutes instead of the 45 I don’t think the tachograph would have reset the driving time shown as it counts POA as break anyway, what the tachograph display shows isn’t particularly relevant, what’s on the printout is what’s on the card so that’s what really matters.
Thanks tachograph, I thought it would just be the half an hour I needed. But to save infringements and it flashing away at me all the way home saying I needed another break, I took the 45. Would putting it back on break instead of POA after using other work to stop the break cause it to add the 2 breaks together to make 45?
The digital tachograph will always regard POA as break, as you know the digital tachograph still counts any break of at least 15 minutes as break regardless of the current 15+30 split break rule, so whenever you have 15 minutes or more POA it will be counted as a break by the tachograph and three 15 minute sessions of POA would reset the driving clock on the tachograph display, still makes no difference to your legal break requirements though.
Basically when you have 15 minutes of either break or POA the digital tachograph thinks you’ve had 15 minutes break and counts it towards the 45 minutes.
As you probably know when you do a printout the data on that printout is taken from the driver card, so you should take more notice of the printout than what the VDU shows.
(poa requirements all met). Tacho cleverly added my 40 min break and my 20 min POA together to total 45 mins break and reset my time.