TPMS Kit from Truck System Technologies

We're here with Mike from Truck System Technologies. And Mike we've spent a lot of time in the past on tires, maintenance, troubleshooting and it's one of the most important components on an RV but yet it's the most neglected. I do seminars all over the country and when I ask people in the seminars, how many people check the tire pressure, every single day, they go out in the road, there's maybe a couple in the seminar, but it's very rare. Very rare, very rare. And it's very important because it's not uncommon to lose a couple of PSI a week just through the structure of the tire, the valves, all that type of stuff plus the heat and the weight that you have. Absolutely. It's recommended that before you take a trip on your checklist at every morning you get out and check the tires. That's a little challenging to do sometimes because of the valve stems and so forth. But then what happens at noon when you're driving down the road or something like that. So to me, I think the tire pressure monitor system is one of the best things to put on it. You know not only the pressure, but you know the heat that's in there, 'cause there's a lot of heat that can develop in this wheel well, exactly. So you've got a system here that's designed for a motor home and we have this unit is a 2002 Brave on a workhorse chassis. And so what I'd like you to do is just tell me a little bit about the system. Let's show people how easy it is to install and how it works. Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me, Dave. TST, our tire pressure monitoring system here. We're gonna set this system up for all six tires on Dave's Winnebago Brave. We'll talk a little bit about tire pressure monitoring and the importance of tire pressure monitoring as Dave mentioned. As we open the box here, you will see the system with all six sensors. That'll be perfect for his setup here on his Winnebago Brave. As we get into the system itself, we do have a signal booster repeater right here that we do recommend to be installed at every application. So this repeater is not only for distance, but it'll also make sure there's no other electrical interference that could affect your reception with your system. So we'll hook this up in a little bit. And one of the things that a lot of people don't realize is that, all our cars and trucks since what four or five years ago came with-- 2007. 2007, okay even longer than that came with the tire pressure monitoring system by law or by-- NTSB mandated it. Yes, sir. Exactly and yet we still don't have them on most of the RVs. Definitely not the trailers, but most of the, motorized now there are some of the big buses and the large supersedes that could have them on but people just kind of take it for granted sometimes if these fall in that same category as your cars and they don't. They absolutely don't. Let's put one of these on. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and put it on. Like I showed you the repeater, we have our power cord for our monitor here. We also have two mounts. We have a suction cup mount that the monitor sits in for the dash and then we also have a flat dash mount. So we have both of the mounts together that will come with your kit. Inside the kit, very important. We have our quick installation guide right here, which will walk you through a complete setup and shows you how easy it actually is. So we're gonna go ahead and get started. In the kit we also include a sticker sheet so we can label each sensor before we pre-program them into the monitor. So I'm gonna go ahead and label each sensor one through six. There we go. Wanna grab the monitor from you. So we're gonna go ahead. They're labeled one through six. And according to the diagram on the quick install sheet one will be the front passenger tire on the motor home. So we're gonna go ahead and program one into the monitor. So to do that, we turn the monitor on, there is a little safety screen which we pull right off of the monitor. And once the monitor is powered on, very easy we press and hold the set button. It takes about three or four seconds and the monitor will beep. Once it beeps, you'll see high pressure down on the corner and we hit the plus button five times and we'll see learn ID right there. We press and release set and that'll bring us to the screen. And we're gonna go ahead and program that number one, position tire. So to go into programming mode, we press and release the set. We hold the sensor directly under the monitor right below the antenna and we press and release the go. As you heard the beep that just picked up the six digit alphanumeric code for this sensor. So we're gonna go ahead and press and release the set to save it. And now we're going to hit the plus button to go to the next tire that we wanna program. In this case, we're doing the driver's side inside tire which will be sensor position number four. We'll grab number four, hold it under the monitor, press and release set, press and release, go. We picked up the code press and release set to save it. And now we're gonna hit the back button twice and we are alarming 'cause it is showing zero pressure. So we're gonna silence the alarm by hitting the plus button twice. So now that we've programmed two sensors, I'm gonna hand Dave, the sensor number four which is the driver rear inner tire and note Dave, the outer shell is gonna spin. So it is theft resistant. So I'm gonna hand Dave the wrench so he can go ahead and put that sensor on. So there's just a little flat spot on both sides. Absolutely, locks it like a wrench. So we're gonna put it on the inner tire here and that's where this extension comes out from here. You'll have a variety of different kinds. This is a braided one. And so we'll take the old cap off and this is just gonna spin. And I did hear it. And you wanna go hand tight. You don't wanna put it too tight, but just go hand tight. And as I put it on I could hear a little bit of air escaping. And as you can see, it's reading 83 pounds in that tire. Now that the sensor has been installed we wanna go ahead and customize our alert parameters. So the way we do that is, press and hold the set button until the monitor beeps. And then we're gonna hit the plus button one time till we see low pressure on the bottom of the screen. And then we're gonna press and release set. Now, since I mentioned we can customize the alert parameters, we do it on a per axle basis. 'Cause it's very common to see different pressures from the steer tires to the drive tires and of course, if you do a tow vehicle back on the tow car. So in this case, on the steer tires, it's flashing. So we're gonna go back to the drive tires right there. And Dave what pressure do you typically like to run in your tires? Well and that's a good point Mike. Proper pressure's not what's printed on the side of the tire or on the data plate in the front and we've done several videos on that. The only way to get proper pressure out of these tires is to weigh the coach and then go to https://www.rvsafety.com and find the tire manufacturers tire chart. Absolutely. It all depends on how much weight is on this. Now this unit is weighed. It is pretty light. Typically we're gonna go 85 on this one. So we see 83 in here. I think it says on the side of the tire, somewhere about 90 range, but it's pretty light. And you do the, you wanna do the fronts and the back, but again, that's https://rvsafety.com. Get the tire pressure, go to cat scale. Absolutely. Weigh your coach if you can get them weighed individually, that's the best. It is the best you're right. RV Safety is about the only company that does that. But let's just say we're gonna put 85 in this one for this sake. And both front and back are pretty much the same. Okay so we're gonna go ahead and press and hold the set button until it beeps. Hit the plus button one time to go to low pressure. Press and release set. We're gonna tap the go to go to the drive axle on the vehicle here. Now you'll see the default is a hundred. Dave said he's running 85 pounds on those tires. So we're gonna set the low pressure, 10% below 85. So we're gonna go down nine pounds which will bring it to about 76. So if we hold the minus button, we'll go to 76 pounds as our low pressure for that axle. Now we're gonna press and release set to save it, we're gonna hit the minus button and we're gonna press and release set again. And now we're gonna set our high pressure. We're gonna go back to the drive axle. Again the default is 175. We recommend going 20 to 25% above on your high pressure. So off of 85 would be 17 would be 102 based off the 20%. So I'm gonna hold the minus button until I get to 102 pounds. And just to clarify, you said 175, you meant 85. Is that right? No 175 is a default on the monitor. So every system out of the box will come to. Oh, I see the monitor itself okay. I just wanted make that clear. I thought you were talking about tire pressure. No, no, no, definitely not. That'd be a big rig. Yeah, it would be a pretty big rig. So we're at 102 there. Once we get to 102, we're gonna press and release set and now we're gonna hit the back button twice. And as you notice, there's no alarms. And one note too, we alarm multiple different ways. So we give you a red flashing light. We give you an audible beep, beep, beep, and then also across the bottom of the screen, we'll give you an alert, a readable alert that'll say low pressure, a fast leak, high temperature or high pressure. So that axle is completely set. There's no alarms. When we go to the front axle, that's still showing low pressure 'cause we haven't installed that sensor yet. Okay so let's do this. We've got six tires on this. I'm gonna put, number one will go to the passenger front. Absolutely. Number two, will go to the driver's front. Number three goes to the outside rear and then five and six go on the other side. So I'm gonna put the other caps on here and then we'll come back and talk about the hooking them up in the different pressures. Absolutely sounds good. So we put four of the tire sensor monitors on but what we found with this unit is the simulator that Winnebago uses has a very small little cutout. And it's impossible to get to that valve stem. Now you can get a pressure tester in there to see what it is, but the whole idea is put these on. So both of the outside tires on the rear here, we're gonna have to take these down to a tire expert. Now the only way to get this off, the simulator off, is to take all these lug nuts off here. 'Cause we took one of the caps off and that's what's holding it in. So I'm gonna have to take this tire off and I'm not gonna do that. I don't recommend that 22,000 pound chassis here trying to jack this up, get those big lugs off there. Take it to a tire shop that's got the equipment just to pop those off and put two of them on. It's worth it. Or put two extensions on. Have it placed, put two extensions on as well, too. Easy for you to access those tires. Right bring them up. So now we've got four of them on, Mike show us what we got on the monitor. Okay so as you see it flashing it's flashing on number three there it's reading 76 pounds and 75 degrees. Now it's over to the other outside tire, 83 pounds and 77 degrees. The front passenger is 81 pounds and 73 degrees. And then the front driver is 88 pounds and 79 degrees. Now note that's a pretty big difference from the two front tires. One's reading 81, one's one 88. That's close to a 10 pound difference which visually you cannot tell by looking at it. So that's something that is very important to keep an eye on. You wanna make sure you run that correct pressure all the time. All right and RV safety education foundation has done a lot of research. If you're 10 PSI less than recommended pressure you reduce your carrying capacity by 25%. Absolutely. And as you can notice on this one you look at the two tires, you can't tell the difference. You cannot tell the difference. So by looking at just visually it's something that's pretty critical. So what it tells me in this one is we've got a lot of tire issues but we lost a little bit of pressure putting these on. And this unit has sat for almost a year in storage. We did some interior work on it that took a little bit of time to do so naturally we're gonna lose some but that's why it's very important to have something that you check and maintain. Tell us about the warranty on this too. And the customer support. All right, great Dave. Well, the warranty we do offer a three-year warranty on this system. And one of the great things about TST is on the back of here we have a call support center, open six days a week. We take customer service extremely serious. We want you all to call if you have any questions at all. We're always there for you. Great and one last thing, well you mentioned it a little bit earlier but it's important that you put the repeater on. Absolutely. And this is just basically gonna boost the signal. So a lot of people put these on, we've got this real close, we're getting a signal but once we put it inside, Wi-Fi all of the stuff that can be in distraction I guess, it's important to put that on so you get all the readings out of the back end. Absolutely. And it hooks right to a 12 volt battery. So in a gas motor home like this, batteries are typically under the steps really easy, reds positive blacks negative, no programming. This will light up when it's ready to go and probably flash. On some of the big diesel pushers, you have chassis or house batteries. They're typically towards the rear of that vehicle. So very easy to install that. And as Dave was saying, obviously heats a tire killer as well too. So a tire just 10% under inflated will increase the footprint, will make obviously your fuel economy go down a little bit, tires not or heat, excuse me is not a tire's friend. So you really wanna make sure you run that correct pressure all the time. Yeah. So great thing to do. Put a tire sensor system on like this make sure you check your tires at a glance right away and you see how easy it is. Thanks a lot Mike. Thanks, Dave. Appreciate it All right.