How to check your tire pressure

How to check your tire pressure?

As is known to all, if tire not be inflated properly, it would result in a worse damage to tires and wheels. It’s important to check tire pressure once a month even they look fine. Responsible driver must take an interest in welfare of their tires, not only to avoid a costly repair bill but also for the safety of themselves. So how can we check tire pressure? We could manually check tire pressure by gauge or automatically checked by TPMS sensor. Please keep in mind that tires should be cold before you check tire pressure, as the friction from driving causes them to heat up and affects the pressure. Make sure that the car has been parked for three to four hours to get an accurate reading from gauge or TPMS sensor.

Method of manually check by gauge

1. Remove the cap from air valve on the tire.

2. Press a reliable pressure gauge against the open valve stem for a second or two, and press it hard. This creates a tight seal around the tire air valve so you don’t accidentally release air from the tire. 

3. Take reading of the PSI (pounds per square inch) from the gauge. For manual gauge, the dial points appear on screen depends on how far the pressure pushed out.

4. Refer to your vehicle handbook for the recommended pressure and compare to the number you measured

5. Replace the tire’s air cap if you don’t need to adjust the air pressure.

6. Repeat this process for each tire. Some cars will have different PSI recommendations for the front and back tires.

Automatically checked by TPMS sensor

If your vehicle not equipped with TPMS sensor, you could install an indirect TPMS by yourselves or worker at auto repair shop. You don’t need to manually check tire pressure once a month once you installed TPMS sensor. TPMS would monitor tire pressure continuously and less overall maintenance for you.

An indirect tire pressure monitoring system doesn’t monitor the tire pressure directly. It monitors the speed at which each wheel is rotating. It warns the driver with error message if any wheel is spinning faster than others, which would happen if said wheel is under inflated. When under inflation detected, it would indicate through TPMS symbol, the TPMS alerts would stay visible until the underlying problem is fixed.

Thus, an indirect tire pressure monitoring system doesn’t actually measure tire pressure. It’s not electronically processing the same kind of measurement you might see with a tire gauge. Instead of an indirect TPMS simply measure how fast your tires are rotating and transmitted a signal to receiver by calculating the data collected.

However, TPMS has much more advantages over gauge in tire pressure measurement. compared to gauge measurement, TPMS less complex process and regular tire maintenance, in another word, it saves money and time for you.  Besides, the constant monitoring of TPMS would reduce the risk of both sudden or gradual tire pressure loss and significantly reduce the car accident. Although TPMS prevent most tire pressure issues, we consider it just another item in your car maintenance toolbox, we still suggest regular checks on tire pressure.