So true depending on where you live it's even hard to sleep in your own house during the day.
The hotels the company puts you up in are some of the cheapest ones in town and most of the time right near the interstate.
Yes you MIGHT make more money but you also need to figure the cost of you eating on the road. I would figure a min. $20 per meal and if you a health nut figure more. Yes you can eat subway and fast food, but that gets old quick and is not that good for you. With the lack of physical active you can watch the pounds pile on.
Some driver have families at home and while have to put food on that table every day the more money you MIGHT make has to feed you on the road.
The different between E-logs and paper are the so called 15mins. The runs that push the drive time limit will have to change e-logs mark time by the second, YES THE SECOND, I see the time stamps on the e-log system. Your paper log goes by the 15mins. Let say you leave the FAC at 4:02am on you paper log book you mark 0415 as drive time. On the E-log it is marked as 0402 from the time the truck starts moving. It might take a little time for the e-log to put you in drive but it will revert back to when the truck started moving which is 0402. You just lost 13mins of drive time. Now when you get to you barn you mark on your paper log you stop driving at 0900 but you didn't get into the yard till 0910 when you stopped the truck. You e-log will say 0910. When you left the FAC you had 4.75hrs of drive time left and on duty was not a factor. What you put on you paper log will show no violation, but on you e-log you would have be out of drive time 0847am you would be stopped waiting for someone to come get you and if you would keep driving then you drove 23mins past you drive time.
I have run runs with my last company and runs that we did on paper were now layovers on the e-log because of these little 15mins.