Tire Pressure Monitor
Something that is highly recommended,especially when towing a car behind the motor home, is a tire pressure monitor. New cars have required this for several years now with a simple “idiot light” warning system. Our RV does NOT have one for it’s own tires, and even if it did, that would do nothing for a towed vehicle. I like to research things and found one recommended a couple of places by people I respect. So I got one from EEZRV. It has individual sensors added on to each tire (hey just screw onto the end of the tire valve) that transmit the tire’s temperature and pressure. A dash mounted display shows the pressure and temperature of each tire on a rotating display. As you start it up, it can take several minutes to get the data from all of the tires. To preserve battery life, the sensors only transmit every few minutes and it’s a vary low power device so it’s easy to miss any one transmission.
Starting out it worked quite will. I had carefully adjusted the pressure in all the tires so I knew what it was. This was all with using one gauge so, if not exactly accurate, it should be conssistent. The readings for the tires were a little off on several tires, but within the accuracy specs of the sensors. Our first long trip with this was a long one to Ft. Davis in west Texas. On the trip out, we had some issues with loosing the sensors on the towed vehicle. We’ve never had an issue with th sensors on the RV itself in all of this.
Coming back was very hot, well over 100 degrees. And we came back on a section of I-10 that is absolutely in horrible shape. We found that we eventually lost all 4 wheel sensors on the towed car. Not a good situation. When we stopped, they would come back on if we waited a while. Not what I needed for such a system. It was essentially useless for monitoring the car. Over the next several weeks of corresponding wth the company, they insisted that there was no problem with vibration or heat with their sensors. The first suggestion was to loosen the cores in the tire valves and that should fix the problem.
Later we took a long trip to see family (about 1100 miles one way). We had the same issues with the towed car and it became obvious that roads that were in poor condition with lots of serious bumps cuased the sensors to drop out. The next suggestion was that the remote temperature sensors we use for reading the outside temperature could interfere with the tire pressure monitor. Took the batteries out of that system. Still have a problem with loosing the car signals. Finally, it was suggested that we try a booster amplifier. Guess what? Still have the problem. And somewhere in the middle of all this, they started recommending that we change the tire valves to all metal or use a valve stem stabiilty device that won’t even fit the rims we have on that vehicle. This last suggestion is to stablilize the tire valves, even though they earlier insisted their sensors have no vibration problems. And my local tire dealer said that they couldn’t use metal stems with the car’s own tire pressure monitors.
I also found out that it will take approximately an hour before the system tells you it has lost communiction with a tire sensor. It continues to show you the last data received, but it could be an hour old before it gets updated, or the system finally tells you it has lost a sensor. This is a long time to wait to get data on a tire that might be failing. It’s probably had a blow out before you would see there is a problem.
I guess I complained enough that they offered to let me return the system. That was appreicated. So I packaged it up and sent it UPS to the address in the emails from their tech support guy. Guess what? It couldn’t be delivered to that address so UPS returned it after three delivery attempts. I have since gotten another email with a different address. I will send it out again on Monday, and hope that I do indeed get a refund. In the meantime, I’m installing a different TPMS from a different company. Given the length of time it took to go through all of this, I’ll hold off posting anything about that until I am sure it works OK.
Somewhere in Texas
September 26, 2015
