Work-truck ownership
Practical guides to keeping a hard-working pickup running through northern Alberta winters: maintenance, cold starts, fluids and upfitting.
A truck that pulls equipment, hauls fuel or lives on lease roads wears differently from one that commutes. This section covers ownership for hard-working trucks in the north.
What we cover here
- Severe-service maintenance. Most owner's manuals have a separate, shorter maintenance schedule for towing, heavy loads, dusty or gravel roads, and extreme cold. If that describes your truck, that schedule is probably yours.
- Cold starts. Block heaters, battery health and what your manual says about diesel fuel and fluids in deep cold.
- Upfitting without overloading. Toolboxes, transfer tanks, racks and canopies all count against payload, and they don't raise your truck's ratings. Our guide to reading the towing sticker explains why.
- Gravel and salt. Washing, wiring connectors and brake lines on trucks that see a lot of winter road treatment.
Your owner's manual is always the first word on your truck's maintenance. Our guides explain what it says and why, so you can have a better conversation with your service advisor.
Guides in this section
Our first in-depth guides for this section are being written and fact-checked now. In the meantime, start with the overview above or browse all guides.